Supermicro 847 Build (Fan, MB)

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Stokkes

New Member
Dec 20, 2013
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Hey all,

I've seen all the threads about SM chassis and the fans but like other threads, the threads seem to die out and have no actual "conclusion".

My currently build is a Supermicro 847 chassis (36 bays, 17 filled in the front currently), the built-in fans are fine at idle load (900rpm) but any time there's any load at all, i start hearing them from a floor away. Honestly, the drive noise (currently 17 drives), PSU noise (SQ PSUs) are fine, the chassis fans are just crazy.

The motherboard is the newer X12SCA-F with a 10th Gen i9-10900.

The X12SCA-F only has 3 settings in the IPMI web interface for Fan settings (and NONE that I can find in the bios) - These are "standard", "Full", "Heavy IO" - there is no "optimal" or other setting and the bios is updated (1.0c)

I know these chassis aren't "meant" to be in a home, but I'd love to fine alternatives.

Anyone replace the stock fans with the Noctua NF-A8 or Arctic F8 ? I have both coming from Amazon tomorrow that I'm going to try to "mod" to see if they fit, but I'm concerned about replacing all of them (if I go Noctua they'd be like $165 CAD for 7 of them), the F8s are about 1/3 the price and most pretty much about the same CFM (33) but the Noctua's are quieter (17dBa vs 22.5 for the F8s). My biggest concern is that at full load, the Noctuas will only move 33-35CFM, whereas the stock ones will move like 75, which is more than double.

Second, anyone have any idea why the chassis fans wouldn't be detected by the board? They're working and they spin up/down based on load (as mentioned) but I only the the CPU_FAN1 in the IPMI interface, the other headers are empty. FYI I am using one of these: Amazon Link which is plugged into SYS_FAN3

Cheers,
 
B

BlueFox

Legendary Member Spam Hunter Extraordinaire
Oct 26, 2015
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There's just no way around the fact that the 847 was never designed to be quiet. Quieter fans are going to lack the static pressure needed for the chassis to maintain adequate drive temperatures. You're probably best off swapping it for an 846.

As for the fan thing, are they actually plugged into your motherboard and not the drive backplanes?
 
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Stokkes

New Member
Dec 20, 2013
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Hey Bluefox,

Yeah i ordered quickly on amazon and doing the math tonight, the static pressure on the Noctua is 2,37mm H2O which I think is like 0.09in vs the stock which are 1.09in, so yeah hgue difference so the amazon order is probably being returned.

As for the fan, the 7 chassis fans are plugged into that PWM hub, and it is plugged into the X12SCA-F on the SYS_FAN3 header.

The fans spin and they change RPMs based on load, so they are being controlled with PWM but I'm not seeing any evidence - which was weird as with my old board (X9) I could see the RPM of the 7 fans (with the hub, they're all set to the same RPM and not controlled individually, but still saw them).

I'm also wondering as an alternative if there's any linux tools that would allow me to control them (lm-sensors doesn't seem to find anything, but that may be due to my problem above with the board not seeing anything on the fan header for the chassis fans).

But overall trying to get any ideas on how to quiet this down just a bit.
 
EffrafaxOfWug

EffrafaxOfWug

Radioactive Member
Feb 12, 2015
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Supermicro fan speeds are controlled through the IPMI interface; you should be able to see the fan speeds on each PWM header via the `ipmitool sensors` command. This'll be complicated somewhat I think if you're using a PWM hub rather than the mobo/backplane headers.

There's an article and an accompanying thread here regarding fan control on SM servers via IPMI that are probably worth a read so you can see what's possible:
 
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Stokkes

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Dec 20, 2013
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EffrafaxOfWug said:
Supermicro fan speeds are controlled through the IPMI interface; you should be able to see the fan speeds on each PWM header via the `ipmitool sensors` command. This'll be complicated somewhat I think if you're using a PWM hub rather than the mobo/backplane headers.

There's an article and an accompanying thread here regarding fan control on SM servers via IPMI that are probably worth a read so you can see what's possible:
Click to expand...
This is fantastic! Precisely what I need. I set the fan wall to 35% and it's so much quieter and seems to keep my drives around 33-35C. I'm build some scripts (like referenced) to monitor the HDD temps and bump the fan speed to full if they hit a certain threshold.

Thank you so much for this!
 
EffrafaxOfWug

EffrafaxOfWug

Radioactive Member
Feb 12, 2015
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Stokkes said:
I'm build some scripts (like referenced) to monitor the HDD temps and bump the fan speed to full if they hit a certain threshold.

Thank you so much for this!
Click to expand...
No worries, glad you found it useful. I actually did a very quick method here for hoiking out the drive temperatures from smartctl;

If you use `hddtemp` in daemon mode you can also grab drive temps very easily from a local network socket.

My main system is an ASRock one now which uses a different set of ipmitool raws but the principle is the same. It won't work with certain drives though (esp. NVME); I did read somewhere that the linux kernel was going to standardise on a temperature reporting system for all drives on a system so you could read everything as a non-root user but not sure if anything came of it.
 
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