LSI 9265-8i - expected chip temperature

[tyab]

I have finished building a new home server using raid 6 with 8x3tb drives, using an LSI 9265-8i raid controller card. When I first fired up the system, just going into the LSI CTRL-H bios setup, after a few minutes the chip temperature of the LSI controller was HOT - so hot that I burned my finger touching the heat sink for 4 secs or so. This is of course with the case cover off. I did not capture what temperature the card bios reported, for I did not leave the system on that long - thinking something was hooked up wrong. Everything was hooked up correctly.

Did some www searches and on Newegg saw that some are also reporting that this board runs really hot. The board is passively cooled - there is no fan on the heat sink. But to be so hot as to actually burn my finger? Ok, I should have moved my finger off faster but I was simply surprised how hot it was.

I ended up attaching a 120mm fan (Noctua running full speed) to a bracket and placed it right next to the LSI board pointed right at it. With that, just booting into the bios I only detected a small amount of heat. Looking at the chip temp it was around 41c. With the system fully complete, closed up and running now 24/7 for 4 days, the chip temp as reported by the management software is around 43c (109f, ambient is around 70f). So this seems ok and must be substantially less than without the fan, but I'm wondering what chip temp others are seeing that are using this board.

Seems to me that for the price of this board they could have engineered a better cooling solution. But with the fan blowing right on it, that seams to deal with the heat.

 

[Patrick]

These cards are meant to have a lot of airflow. Just to give you an idea in a 2U having a bunch of fans in the middle of the chassis all eating 16-18w at full load is pretty common. I had a LSI 2308 chip that was pushing over 100C when the chassis top cover was off recently. Pretty common to see a RAID controller run really hot as they are meant to have good airflow. Areca has used active coolers on their boards to keep temps down.

 

[dba]

These high-end RAID cards are almost always used in server chassis, which have very good airflow - enough to keep a whole chassis full of heat generating devices cool, including the CPUs in fact.

My personal preference is that I want a server chassis provide the airflow and not the individual devices. The chassis fans are monitored and throw alerts when they fail - something that device fans don't always do. On the other hand, for workstations I like quiet and for that it makes sense to let each device provide it's own cooling.

I have finished building a new home server using raid 6 with 8x3tb drives, using an LSI 9265-8i raid controller card. When I first fired up the system, just going into the LSI CTRL-H bios setup, after a few minutes the chip temperature of the LSI controller was HOT - so hot that I burned my finger touching the heat sink for 4 secs or so. This is of course with the case cover off. I did not capture what temperature the card bios reported, for I did not leave the system on that long - thinking something was hooked up wrong. Everything was hooked up correctly.

Did some www searches and on Newegg saw that some are also reporting that this board runs really hot. The board is passively cooled - there is no fan on the heat sink. But to be so hot as to actually burn my finger? Ok, I should have moved my finger off faster but I was simply surprised how hot it was.

I ended up attaching a 120mm fan (Noctua running full speed) to a bracket and placed it right next to the LSI board pointed right at it. With that, just booting into the bios I only detected a small amount of heat. Looking at the chip temp it was around 41c. With the system fully complete, closed up and running now 24/7 for 4 days, the chip temp as reported by the management software is around 43c (109f, ambient is around 70f). So this seems ok and must be substantially less than without the fan, but I'm wondering what chip temp others are seeing that are using this board.

Seems to me that for the price of this board they could have engineered a better cooling solution. But with the fan blowing right on it, that seams to deal with the heat.

 

[mobilenvidia]

The LSI controllers are designed to run hot, they are often in 1u/2u servers where they are crammed in with not much space around them, also why they have no fan as it won't fit in a single slot.
Keep an eye on the Motherboard ambient temperature once this starts to creep up you know the internals of the case are getting warm a sure sign of lack of air flow.

 

[tyab]

Thanks all. My system is based around a Norco RPC-430, 4U. Using this since my rack is under 20" deep. Some parts (cpu/motherboard) were leftovers from older builds. Main use is multimedia streaming throughout the home, but will also be used to backup all the machines (especially the teen machines, how do they keep messing them up?). Here are the temps at this exact moment (raid controller is currently xfering some 4TB via gigabit network).

Ambient: 21c

CPU (E8400): 32c (avg across cores) (Noctua NH-UB9 cooler fit perfectly in this case)
Motherboard (x48 gigabyte): 34c
SSD boot drive: 33c
video card (just a low end half length passive cooled 5450): 36c
Raid 6 drives: (8x3TB) all between 32c and 34c
LSI: 50c (this is with the fan blowing right on it). It does drop down to around 43c-45c when no disk activity is taking place.

I added 2x92mm fans to pull air across the raid drives (no room in this case for a push setup) - had to make a custom mount for those two fans.

From the above comments, the LSI chip temp is to be expected. Just seems to me that with the cost of that board, when I look at the heatsink on it, there is room for a good 10% larger area heatsink, it could be made out copper, and it could be tad thicker allowing deeper fins and thus more surface area lowering the temp especially in those small 2u cases. Lower temp, longer life, etc... Sure looks like the same heatsink as the 9260 (I bet it is for cost savings).

Again - thank for the comments, I'm just glad I built that bracket/fan to blow all that air across it.

 

[mobilenvidia]

Any air in a case is good air

Do you have a BBU for the the 9265 ?
It has to fit on it as well.
My 9260 (IBM M5015) there is no space between the SAS ports on left and BBU on the right for a bigger heatsink.

Remember LSI sell these 926x cards by the 1000's to the big companies like IBM, Dell even Oracle have them
LSI could not afford to loose a giant contract just for the sake of a few cents on a heatsink.

 

[tyab]

Thanks again. I was going to bring up questions on the BBU next. I currently do not have a BBU for the LSI, but the entire system is hooked up to an APC smart 700 rack UPS. From the LSI documents, they recommend not enabling write-back unless you have the BBU or are on an UPS (makes sense). Since the majority use for this machine is streaming (and backup) I currently do not have write-back enabled. In the BIOS setup, they had options for write-back and write-back with BBU (which disables write-back if the BBU fails). So for those of you that have experience with the LSI chips, is the BBU still required with an UPS? If I wanted to enable write-back would you recommend also getting the BBU?

Thanks in advance - such good info from all of you!