I didn't think to try to grab before and after temps, d'oh... I scraped off the kinda dry silver factory stuff and used this old gigantic tube of Arctic Silver "Ceramique" I have had sitting around forever. On the desktop version of the case you have to remove the whole board from the case in order to get to the CPU surface, so it was a little more involved...
I appreciate the pointer on the fan. This unit is actually sitting on a wire shelf directly below a Cisco 3850 12X48U, which is not at all quiet. The whole setup is in my crawlspace and I'm not normally within earshot of it all except if I'm working on something that requires local console access. (If I try
really hard I can sometimes make out the fans over the general background of the house, but not usually.) I'm going to give that fan you linked a try and see how it does. My main concern is cooling the pair of NVMe and the RAM I have in the system, which the Noctua seems to do OK, but I'm also hoping to get enough residual airflow out the SFP cages to potentially not need a separate fan on a SFP+ ONT/ONU (which tend to run really hot). As long as the fan isn't super high-pitched and whiny, I probably will never hear it over the noise of the Cisco.
You need a little adapter cable to go from the "Picoblade" connector that is on the board to a "standard" desktop-style 4-pin PWM header.
This is the exact one I bought from eBay, but I have zero relationship with the seller beyond being a buyer. Feels more than a little overpriced for what it is, but I had a hard time finding any alternatives... FWIW I have not been able to find any way to monitor or control the fan, either. It seems to be temperature controlled but I didn't see RPM shown anywhere in the bios/UEFI.
Apparently the 1U version of the system has a second header on the CPU-side of the board; that header is
not populated on my desktop-case version at least.