DL180 G6 (Serverworks Edition ILO2!) $25 motherboard

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TangoWhiskey9

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Jun 28, 2013
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Also - yes - HP 507247-001 is the right heatsink. Note that it does not have its own fan. The DL180 G6 uses a server cooling design with a plastic air baffle to force airflow over the heatsinks. Baffle is HP 507256-001 and should work any any 2U case with a midplane fan design (SM, Norco, etc).

I think you'll have to pick up the HP coolers to make it work because the mounting is so proprietary and you want a good seating of the cooler. You could probably get away without the baffle if you ghetto mod fans onto the coolers. But no matter what you do you are probably paying more for CPU cooling than you did for the MB - which is amusing!
Here's a link for the heatsink: HP 507247 001 Server Heatsink for Proliant DL180 G6 490448 001 | eBay

Now... kinda funny that two cost more than the mobo.
 

britinpdx

Active Member
Feb 8, 2013
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Portland OR
@PigLover, @TangoWhiskey - thanks indeed for the help & advice. 6pin fan pinout info would be great.

Heatsinks purchased ... and they did in fact cost just a little more (incl shipping) than the MoBo. I've feeling that this little "ghetto" project is going to cost more than I had anticipated, and I should have just purchased a CTO unit ....

.... but where's the fun in that :eek:
 

PigLover

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Jan 26, 2011
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6-Pin Fan connector. Can't find official pinouts.

Connector is 6-pin Molex 2510 A. Readily available. Example here: 2510 2 54mm 6 Pin JST Connector Plug w Wire x 5 Sets | eBay

On the female connector, with the pins down and the guide-tabs facing you Pin #1 is on your left:




Fans are assumed to be installed in duplex redundant pairs - back-to-back fans. "Inlet" is fan facing the front of the chassis pulling air through the drive cage and blowing into the other fan. "Outlet" is the rear fan of the pair and blows out into the chassis.

Pin #1 is Outlet sense (blue)
Pin #2 is pwm control (yellow, both fans tied together)
Pin #3 is Inlet sense (blue)
Pin #4 is Inlet power (red, 12v)
Pin #5 is gnd (both fans tied together)
Pin #6 is Outlet power (red, 12v)

HP uses a splitter to connect the fan headers to the duplex fans. Its HP 534358-001/536646-001 (both PNs are correct - one is for original, the other is the replacement PN).If you can find them it would be quite simple to replace the male end of each split with a standard 4-pin fan connector so that you can use standard fans.

 
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britinpdx

Active Member
Feb 8, 2013
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Portland OR
6-Pin Fan connector.

Pin #1 is Outlet sense (blue)
Pin #2 is pwm control (yellow, both fans tied together)
Pin #3 is Inlet sense (blue)
Pin #4 is Inlet power (red, 12v)
Pin #5 is gnd (both fans tied together)
Pin #6 is Outlet power (red, 12v)
Brilliant ... just what I needed !!

Your eBay link reminded me that I had purchased connectors in the past. Turns out that I already have the 6 pin connector + pigtails (purchased from eBay which I can easily re-pin) as well as 4pin fan connector & pins. Looks like I'm good to go on the fan front.



I'm still looking for the "front connector" pinout ... not turning much up with a Google search. I suppose I could always break out the DVM and see which of the front connector pins maps to pin 16 (PS_ON) of the 24pin power connector to get me going.

I've also picked up a riser card (534235-001) to get some pci-e capability and I'm now thinking about the mechanical challenges of (a) stabilizing the riser and (b) modifying a chassis to accommodate the pci-e boards plugged into the riser. This is likely to be the tricky part.
 

nethel

New Member
Jan 9, 2013
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For those of you running the serverworks mobo, does it quiet down the fans at all?

I'm trying to find a way to save my DL180, but it has to become drastically quieter.
 

nethel

New Member
Jan 9, 2013
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Which version of the DL180 do you have? There is an eight-fan version and a four-fan version. I have the four fan version, and it isn't that noisy for a rackmount.
I've got the 8. Even in a 50deg room I can hear it through a door.
 

ecosse

Active Member
Jul 2, 2013
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For those of you running the serverworks mobo, does it quiet down the fans at all?

I'm trying to find a way to save my DL180, but it has to become drastically quieter.
Have you any additional cards on a riser board? If so, take them out.
 

PigLover

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Jan 26, 2011
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For those of you running the serverworks mobo, does it quiet down the fans at all?

I'm trying to find a way to save my DL180, but it has to become drastically quieter.
You've seen correct answers from DBA & ecosse. Let me add some more color.

HP does a pretty decent job of environmental management of their systems. They use a design approach that they call "Sea of Sensors" which pretty much puts temperature (and sometimes airflow) sensors all over the boards and chassis they design. Then they integrate these sensors into the BMC firmware and actually do a really good job of running their fans as slowly as possible to maintain environmental specs. In newers (Gen8) servers they also do things like stopping un-needed fans entirely and shutting down un-needed PSUs (in their N+1 PSU designs like C7000). A DL180 or DL380 with "native" parts in a reasonably cool room will run as close to silent most any server you will ever use.

Unfortunately, this also means that anytime they can't figure out the right environmental solution they default to a cautious one. In the case of the DL1xx//DL3xx this means that as long as you stick with "standard and expected" configurations they run almost silent. By "expected configurations" I mean nothing plugged into the PCIe slots except cards whose sensors they "know" in the BMC code - which pretty much means only P212 or P410i raid controllers and HP-branded network cards. Even "newer" HP cards that they didn't expect to see in this chassis will be seen as unknown (ex: an H222 HBA in a DL180).

Plug anything else into these slots and they have no senor data to know if the card is overheating or not - so they crank up the fans to be safe.

Really there are only four things to be done:
1) you can use only "known" cards - but these are almost certainly not what you want
2) you can find and flash really old versions of the BIOS and BMC firmare from before they started their "sea of sensors" program (this probably has more to do with why DBAs node is quiet than its being a 4-fan config since 4-fan DL180s are almost by definition really old).
3) live with it
4) buy a different server
 
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ecosse

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Jul 2, 2013
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Really there are only four things to be done:
1) you can use only "known" cards - but these are almost certainly not what you want
2) you can find and flash really old versions of the BIOS and BMC firmare from before they started their "sea of sensors" program (this probably has more to do with why DBAs node is quiet than its being a 4-fan config since 4-fan DL180s are almost by definition really old).
3) live with it
4) buy a different server
Great answer. Interesting comment on #2 - I went back one version or so and then gave up. I'll look into that. I would definitely keep my DL180 as part of my intended infrastructure if I could reduce the noise. I wonder if DBA can provide the BMC firmware version shown at boot up?

There are a couple of other things that could be done I think.

5) Mod the fans to run slower. I've read someone fitting one of those Zalman fan controllers to the fans to manually slow them down. Of course, the trick is not to slow them down too much as to overheat your server.
6) Buy an "acoustic" cabinet to stick the loud stuff in. Since I have lots of noisy cr&p this is what I did :)
 

novegg4

Member
Nov 23, 2013
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Would anyone mind to share pin-out for the power panel header?
Still have no idea how to "light out" things like "power on", "reset", "HDD LED" (maybe LAN activity?)
My Synergy contacts have just given up to provide the info...
Thank you in advance.

Disclaimer: the image below belongs to britinpdx

 
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mrkrad

Well-Known Member
Oct 13, 2012
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dude you can buy all the bits and bobs off ebay cheap like front control panel. hell I've got a 12LFF sas expander front end if you want the whole thing its literally the front clip! with 2LFF rear tray/riser and cables to go from motherboard->sas expander power -> rear clip since the sas expander drives those 2 rear drives so one raid card can create a single 14LFF raid-50 :)
 

novegg4

Member
Nov 23, 2013
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Thanks, but all I need is just the pin out.
The boards have been used as nodes in regular modded mid-tower cases with desktop CPU cooling, etc.
So far I was able to find the "power on" pins (experimentally)... that's all

It looks like the cheapest panel is about $18:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-490538-001-Proliant-DL160-G6-Server-Front-UID-LED-Switch-2x-USB-Port-Assembly-/300928464067?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item4610bbf4c3

which sounds a bit too much (especially because the board itself costs about $25).
 
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mrkrad

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Oct 13, 2012
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yeah I was thinking I could do pretty cheap for the 12PORT LFF front clip and rear 2LFF (with riser) since I'm doing the lefthand setup (8 port LFF fan-out), that would include the panel which you can move anywhere.

you got the P4300 mother board(Se1120/se1220)? they have ILO2 rather than the crappy lo100
 

Stanza

Active Member
Jan 11, 2014
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Hmmm well that sucks, emailed seller about buying a couple of boards.

Unfortunately we can't ship outside the US, as HP restricts us from selling outside the USA.

But this also says to me that these are NEW boards?

.
 

mrkrad

Well-Known Member
Oct 13, 2012
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HP does restrict resellers from selling out of their sell-to zone. It would put them in a bad place to get caught selling to other countries. Have to do everything by the book if you want to resell HP gear legit.
 

pgh5278

Active Member
Oct 25, 2012
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Hello Stanza, I just needed to get one of the 25USD ILO2 HP boards ( to help isolate a problem in a DL180G6) ,
I just received one in Australia from this ebay dealer using my "shipito" address in US. Added it to another shipment, so cost was minimal, as opposed to trying to get one here or elswhere...

Cheers PGH