Thanks for pulling my bacon off the fire, again! The other 4 blue slots worked.
I also got the Dell card installed. It's in IT more so it looks like I'm good there. I still haven't taken the time to address the BMC but I did download the .zip.
Noise...... Not good. Its about as loud as a vacuum. It's certainly not the loudest machine I've heard but not good. My Norco 2024 was preposterously loud before I swapped the fans out and would drown this thing out. Can I get water blocks for these CPU sockets? I've got a crazy water cooling system that I could plumb this thing to and then use less noisy fans.
Well, your liquid cooling question may have been rhetorical for all I know. But I'm stuck in the house for yet another day, so I have time to respond. To keep spouse approval up, all my gear is in my home office with me, and because nothing is more than 8 feet or so from my ear, I've gone to stupid lengths at times to deal with noise. Here's what I recommend...in order. Keep in mind that my advice is worth exactly what you're paying for it
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1. FIRST! Make sure you know what's actually making the noise. IF you can silence any audible alarms, try running for a few minutes with the midplane fan wall unplugged. Not too long, but long enough to get it booted up and idling. It would suck to go to a bunch of effort on that front only to find out the most annoying noise was coming from the power supplies.
2. SECOND. If it is the fan wall, then you might want to check the BIOS/IPMI to see if you can change the fan curve. It sounded like you weren't going to be hitting it super hard, with lots of VMs crunching numbers, so a more "quiet" setting may be in order if one is available. I've not got this or any Quanta gear, so can't tell you how to do that, or even if its possible. If it was custom for some volume user, then the fan curve may not be adjustable.
3. If that doesn't work, can you swap the fans for quieter? Somebody out there probably lists specs (CFM/CMM, pressure, and decibels) for the installed fans. With that, you can look for fans with similar air volume and pressure, but less noise. Of course, some systems get upset if you don't use stock fans. Best to check with something on hand first, to see if it throws an alarm
4. If that doesn't work, consider if you need to run both CPUs. You pulled a Nehalem system for this? The absolute fastest LGA1156 Nehalem CPU is still 40% slower than just one E5-2620. Pulling one CPU will make less heat and if your system can tolerate a fan swap, you may be able to use quieter and lower volume fans where the second CPU was, since there's less heat to tamp down. You'll still need to have enough air flow to draw in across the drives to keep them cool though. Its a trial and error thing. Oh, and again, if its a custom firmware for a vendor, it may not run on one CPU. Trial and error again.
5. If none of that appeals, then liquid cooling is possible. From internet pictures, that board appears to use square ILM 2011 sockets. Lots of available water blocks for that. Besides looking for LGA2011, you can look for blocks with compatibility with X79 or X99 systems. Same mounting holes on those. If you have rectangular (technically "Narrow") Loading mechanisms/heatsinks, then the selection goes down significantly. Unless you have 92mm radiators to sandwich into the fan wall, you'll have to cut a hole/holes in the lid, and if space is tight inside, pass the radiator out of the hole to mount outside the lid. The obvious inclination for folks that mount cooling in a server cover is to mount the radiator/fan onto the lid itself over the hole. Which makes it an absolute BEAR to take the lid off because you have to unbolt the radiator every time. Better solution is to fabricate something to hold the Rads/fans in place independent of the cover and slip the cover over. That, as you can imagine is an effort in itself. Do you want to do that? Plus, the server was designed for forced air cooling. If you cut a hole in it, that's going to mess that all up. Consider what won't get cooled properly if there's a hole in the case and air doesn't move all the way from front to back. A quiet system that fries itself....well hey if its dead its totally silent, right? Not saying you can't do it. But its not as easy and hooking something up to a gaming case fan mounting point. On a 2U server, the only real place to mount a 120MM Rad is in the only removable panel.
6. Regardless of what you do, don't forget the HBA. LSI specs their older cards for 200 linear feet per minute of airflow over the heatsink. A DELL card with LSI chip would be similar I suppose. So, if you are going to lower overall airflow, consider some point cooling for the card's heatsink. If you're lucky, the hole pattern for the heatsink pins will correspond to a stock fan size and you can add a fan on top of the heatsink with some long machine screws passed through the fan and heatsink to the back of the card. Just don't tighten them down too much.
Wow, that was quite a novel.
