Adding active cooling to a 10g pci-e nic

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fmatthew5876

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Mar 20, 2017
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Does anyone have experience with adding active cooling to a 10g pci-e nic?

In particular, I've got a Chelsio T520-SO-CR. After putting it in my box and booting up, its running at 88 degrees F idle with no cables plugged into it. Its very hot to touch.

The card is rated up to 131 F. I'm concerned that once I actually start pushing bits through it, its going to run much hotter and affect stability. Its also very close to other pci-e cards and I'm afraid of the heat from this one damaging those.

The Chelsio card actually has a white box drawn on the pcb around the passive heatsink with 4 mounting holes. The white box measures 2" x 2". I have no idea where you'd get a new active heatsink which actually fits this form factor.

One idea I had was to get a 40mm Noctua and secure it onto the heatsink by zip tieing it through the holes.

Another was to get one of those stupid pci slot blowers, and place it directly under the card. It seems like the blower might actually better, as its pulling the hot air directly out of the case, but I really don't know until I try. I'm also concerned as those blowers are cheaply designed consumer grade crap which are likely to break. One review even mentioned one of them catching fire.

Has anyone had to solve this problem before? If so what would you recommend?

Thanks!
 
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Rain

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May 13, 2013
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One idea I had was to get a 40mm Noctua and secure it onto the heatsink by zip tieing it through the holes.
I've done exactly this to ConnectX-2 cards in desktop machines with little to no airflow in the PCIe region of the case.

I wouldn't be too worried about excess heat in the case; we're not talking about a GPU pumping out 200W+. On the spec sheet for the Chelsio card you mentioned, the typical power consumption is only 9W. With even a tiny bit of airflow over the heatsink it will stay cool.
 

i386

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You will probably need fans if you don't already have some in your chassis.
If you have some fans already, replace them with faster ( but louder) fans.
 

fmatthew5876

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You will probably need fans if you don't already have some in your chassis.
If you have some fans already, replace them with faster ( but louder) fans.
I'm using a SuperMicro 743TQ-1200B-SQ chassis. I've got the fan bracket filled with 4 FAN-0104L4 which is the super quiet fan model for this chassis. If active cooling the card itself doesn't work, I could also try the FAN-0082L4 fans which are used in the non-SQ version of this chassis.
 

i386

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Okay that's a chassis with proper airflow, it should be enough to cool the card.
 

fmatthew5876

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Okay that's a chassis with proper airflow, it should be enough to cool the card.
In theory yes, but there surely is a limitation to how much stuff you can cram into the chassis before needing something more powerful than the SQ fans. I've already got all of my pci-e slots loaded.
 

fmatthew5876

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Adding some fans worked extremely well.

I got a few Noctua NF-A4-10 FLX fans and secured them onto my 10g nics using zip ties. I powered them using cheap molex to 3 pin adapters, to ensure they always run at full speed and don't interact at all with any kind of fan control via the system bios.

I've got one Chelsio T520-SO-CR in my main freebsd storage server, and another in my pfsense box.The freebsd driver for the Chelsio t5 series provides a temperature read-out via sysctl dev.t5nex.0.temperature.

After adding the fans, the pfense 1u box temperature went from 79 to 52. The FreeBSD 4u storage server went from 89 to 48 (I also cleared some cables out of the pci area to improve airflow).

 
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MongrelRoo

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Dec 29, 2020
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I did the same with the 20mm thick PWM version (which I run at a constant speed.. but it’s nice to have PWM to pick what that speed is to avoid resonant/annoying frequencies) ... now the temps are dramatically lower. To get the required airflow according to Chelsio specs just off case airflow I’d have to run the case fans at 100% the whole time (a “no go” in my lounge room).CF77DE21-50E2-471D-A9B1-515A6972A349.jpg
 
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