On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 10:38 AM, John R Pierce pierce@hogranch.com wrote:
Rudi Ahlers wrote:
This is when I realized that the Q9300 CPU could be too big a processor for the fan that I have installed.
The fan that I have, is: http://www.dynatron-corp.com/products/cpucooler/cpucooler_model.asp?id=165
So, it looks like it's not really made for a Q9300 CPU, although their specs say it is
that fan says its for up to 135 watt CPUs, I don't think a q9300 is anywhere near that, so unless that heatsink fan is grossly under its speced capability, I dont think thats a problem. Yeah, the Q9300 is 95W max, and thats with all 4 cores running heavy math...
HOWEVER. Intel desktop boards generally have a passive heatsink on the northbridge and expect the downdraft from a conventional CPU fan to cool said northbridge. your 1U configuration might not be moving enough air past that northbridge. I know on my DG33TL in a desktop minitower, the G33 northbridge runs pretty hot, and I had to arrange for some extra airflow past it since I used a 'tower cooler' which blew the air sideways rather than down.
I still think running four instances of mprime (from www.mersenne.org) each bound to a different cpu affinity (-a0, -a1, -a2, -a3) and running the 'torture test' overnight will tell you a lot. do this with xen disabled, just the base system running at init 3. any sort of computational or memory timing related glitch will show up as a numeric error and be logged by the program.
Well, as you can imagine, I didn't think the CPU would / could be a problem when I installed it, due to it's lower wattage rating.
Looking at the motherboard layout, I wonder what will happen when I turn the CPU fan 90 degrees "down" so that it blows through the very large northbridge heatsink? I was even thinking of trying to look for a NB heatsink with a fan, but don't know if they exist. I'll give that a try, and see what happens.
The 2 butterfly fans are pretty useless though, since they blow directly into the memory modules, and don't even come close to the CPU / NB.
On a side note, I'm able to touch the NB heatsink and it doesn't really feel that hot. Unfortunately I can't get lm_sensors to work on the MB, so I can't even tell the temp / fan speeds