My cooling solution for an LSI card.

[rsumperl]

Hello everyone,
I wanted to share a cooling solution I came up with for my LSI 9460-16i in an Intel P4304xxmuxx chassis with an Intel S2600STBR motherboard.
Unlike the Adaptec cards, the LSI cards do not have a heat-sink with threaded holes for fan mounting or a fan mounting bracket. So, I came up with this solution. It uses the BBU bracket as the mounting solution. The fan is a 40x40x15 fan and the standoffs are 7/8" tall. The standoffs are threaded for 4-40 screws.
The LSI card stays at 46° C.

Ray

 

[Stephan]

Nice, but consumes too many slots IMHO.

My solution was to use a very low slot for the LSI card. Even below that (where no more PCIe slots are on the motherboard) I have a "VGA Titan TTC-SC07TZ" together with a 92mm Noctua NF-A9 FLX fan. This Titan is a metal pseudo PCIe slot card that comes with two rather cheap 92mm fans. I think it was ment originally to cool passively cooled VGA cards that turned out to become too hot.

You can remove half of the frame so it only holds one fan anymore. Furthermore I removed the manual fan speed control of the card (two small Philips screws), because I have a temperature sensor between heatsink and PCB of the LSI-controller. You can see its black cable held in place by a black zip tie on rightmost edge of the SAS controller card. The Noctua fan is regulated by an Aquaero LT 6. Overkill I know, but I wanted a temperature and dead fan alert.

Bonus is you can't hear anything because the Noctua here idles all of the time at 850rpm, SAS temperature as measured between heatsink and PCB close to the chip is ~46degC.

 

[ari2asem]

put the same small fan on the metalic cooling block of your card, with screws for wood.

 

[gb00s]

I have better experience providing airflow from behind the card. But if it works for you, cool. Nice.

 

[Tom5051]

small fans are really noisy and wear out the fastest. I put 1x 120mm fan sitting ontop of all the PCIe cards. No slots lost, cools all 3 cards.

 

[Tumoshimo]

small fans are really noisy and wear out the fastest. I put 1x 120mm fan sitting ontop of all the PCIe cards. No slots lost, cools all 3 cards.

This solution is needed by me too. So it works. Thank you for sharing info.