X10SDV-4C-7TP4F Xeon D SAS Controller Overheating?

[K D]

Installed the board in an SC835 after replacing the passive heatsink with a supermicro SNK-C0057A4L. The Air shroud is in place and fully covers the onboard LSI 2116. After letting it idle for a couple of hrs, the CPU temperature stabilized at around 30 degrees. But the SAS2 temperature SAS2 stays really high at ~70 degrees. Is this normal? Do I need to hack a 40or 60mm fan on it to bring down the temperature?

@IamSpartacus : I think you are using this board (or the 1537 variant) in atleast one of your storage nodes. Is this comparable to your setup?

Please note that I dont have any drives connected yet.

 

[Rahvin9999]

Have one of these boards myself.
Im not surprised by the temperature, these chips run relatively hot.
You need airflow to go over the heatsink of the 2116 otherwise it will start to overheat once you have disk activity. So putting a fan with a little duct or a fan on top of it works wonders.

 

[IamSpartacus]

Installed the board in an SC835 after replacing the passive heatsink with a supermicro SNK-C0057A4L. The Air shroud is in place and fully covers the onboard LSI 2116. After letting it idle for a couple of hrs, the CPU temperature stabilized at around 30 degrees. But the SAS2 temperature SAS2 stays really high at ~70 degrees. Is this normal? Do I need to hack a 40or 60mm fan on it to bring down the temperature?

@IamSpartacus : I think you are using this board (or the 1537 variant) in atleast one of your storage nodes. Is this comparable to your setup?

Please note that I dont have any drives connected yet.

Im running 4 different Xeon D boards with the onboard LSI 2116 (actually one is an LSI 3008) and yes, they all run hot even with decent airflow over them. I wound up buying 40mm fans for each of them and placed them directly on the SAS2 heatsink and that has helped a lot. Before the installation of the 40mm fans my temps were running high 60's low 70's. Now it runs pretty consistently around 48-50C.

 

[PigLover]

70C is in the range of "normal" for an LSI2116. Yes - hot. But not worrisome. They do need quite a bit of airflow.

 

[T_Minus]

They run hot, even on AOCs.

For my onboard I put a 40mmfan on with axial screws, there's a couple threads here from 16 and 15 about myself and others doing it with pics and links to proper screws.

Check temp specs 70*C I think is within spec tho.

 

[K D]

Thanks All... Right now, I just have a fan resting on the heatsink. I've ordered the screws as described in this post to make it stable

Need help setting up RAID1 with 2x Samsung 850 LSI 9260-8i

 

[altano]

So I've been reading all the threads about the CPU and SAS controller overheating and I didn't feel like buying more fans so, upon receiving my X10SDV-7TP4F, I did some experimentation and ended somewhere a little crazy.

Here is my baseline for idle:

CPU: 88c
PCH: 82c
SAS2: 89c

I grabbed a 45-degree mounting plate from my Silverstone FT03 case to see what effect a fan blowing more directly on the heatsinks would have:

After 10m of Prime95 Small FFTs

As you can see, the SAS2 temp is 28c degrees lower but the CPU temp is still climbing unbounded. After 5m of idle things look good again:

I was wondering if reversing the exhaust fan above the CPU would help. While I was at it I moved the cables out of the way of the heatsinks:

This setup was horrible. The fan doesn't have enough power or static pressure to do anything but blow hot CPU air over the SAS controller. Temperatures grew unbounded and got too hot for my liking, so killed the Prime95 test and shut down the machine from here:

I was going to play with a cardboard shroud but I just don't have any 140mm fans with enough CFM/pressure.

As an experiment, I took the 45 degree fan and just held it up close to the CPU/controller while running Prime95:

This dropped the CPU temp to 80c and kept dropping so I stopped the experiment and rigged up what would be my final solution, mostly only possible because I'm working in a giant PC-D8000 Lian-Li case:

Temps with this setup look good. After 10m Prime95, FULL fans:

After 5M more still running Prime95, temps didn't move:

What appear to be my new idle temps (Ambient has dropped over the course of testing from about 68 degrees outside to 63. Not sure what my room is but window is open so close to that):

I haven't tested with my fans set to the Optimal profile yet (as opposed to Full) but the server's in my closet so I don't mind the noise.

Just thought I'd post this in case anyone wanted to avoid anything more complicated themselves.

 

[chilipepperz]

I think that @altano needs better cooling. Those heatsinks are expected to get lots of airflow.

 

[i386]

He has enough airflow, but not high static pressure for the heatsinks.

 

[Evan]

Especially the CPU needs higher static pressure.
Surprised that 140mm above does an ok job. Those SAS controllers do run hot !!

 

[altano]

Especially the CPU needs higher static pressure.
Surprised that 140mm above does an ok job. Those SAS controllers do run hot !!

The final solution is a 120mm Noctua NF-F12 hanging by the pink twine over the heat sinks with lots of static pressure. That's how I got the final temps I posted.

 

[T_Minus]

Also can just screw a smaller fan to the SAS controller directly, I did that a couple times, probably easy enough to do for the CPU HS too.

 

[Evan]

For CPU I used a noctua 40mm fan attached on my Xeon-D that had the passive heatsink. Works fine.

I don't have any boards with the 2116 SAS but considering one since it's a good alternative to an AOC even though I won't get SAS3 speeds but a fast SSD is fast at 6GB/s or 12GB/s.

 

[K D]

For CPU I used a noctua 40mm fan attached on my Xeon-D that had the passive heatsink. Works fine.

I don't have any boards with the 2116 SAS but considering one since it's a good alternative to an AOC even though I won't get SAS3 speeds but a fast SSD is fast at 6GB/s or 12GB/s.

What temps are you seeing with a noctua 40mm fan on the CPU? The supermicro active cooler is a little noisier than I prefer. Wondering if the passive cooler with a noctua 40mm would be better.

 

[Evan]

What temps are you seeing with a noctua 40mm fan on the CPU? The supermicro active cooler is a little noisier than I prefer. Wondering if the passive cooler with a noctua 40mm would be better.

~45-50 degrees at idle depending on ambient temp, upto ~70 I think I remember at load but don't have the figures, I can run some load later if your really interested.
Not sure if they are good figures but seemed acceptable to me, I did not replace the stock cooler, I had purchased the passive cpu model originally and I have it not in a 1u case so the noctua was just an easy solution.

There is a whole discussion thread on the cooljag coolers etc, but except for the noise the SM fan seems to do a decent job. Sad that they are a bit noisy.

 

[K D]

That sounds like about what I see with the SM cooler running under "Optimal" fan profile. Temps are about 10c lower with "full speed" fans but the SM fan is noisy.

 

[Evan]

@K D i don't think it really needs to run any cooler, they are embedded chips and intel rates them to reasonably high temps. I would just run optimal profile and be happy with less noise.

I have to open up one of my systems in a week or so to make some changes for drives (internal not hot swap), I have s few different fans so may have a play with ones not directly mounted on the CPU see if I can improve temps but I just left it an happen enough until now.

 

[K D]

@Evan Thanks for the info.

I am not worried about the temperatures. It's more about the noise. I have 2 X10SDV-6C+-TLN4F boards in SuperMicro SC826 chassis with fans replaced with noctua 80mm fans. If I dont run the noctuas at full duty, then the board idle temperatures are 7-10c more during idle. This board doesnt have 2 zones like most SuperMicro boards for fan control and so If I run the fans at full speed, the SM CPU Cooler also runs at 100% and it is noisy.

I had originally gotten the case with SAS2 backplanes and had the fans connected to the backplane. I recently replaced it with a TQ backplane that does not have any fan connections and had to move the fans to the motherboard connector. Since then the CPU cooler is the loudest part of the system. Looking at 3 options

1. Mod the noctuas to run at full speed always
2. Replace the fans on the SM Coolers with GELID Silent5 FN-SX05-40
3. I have 2 passive heatsinks for xeon systems. Install them and stick a noctua 60mm fan on top.

Have been busy for the past few days and havent been able to get to this yet. I still need to finish up some work on my new FreeNAS server. Hopefully I'll be able to get that done and work on this later in the week.

 

[Evan]

Got it, I see the issue you have... right now I don't have any easy ideas for you other than a fan controller to tame the CPU fan but I am sure there must be more elegant solutions

 

[dsumike]

Background:
I have this board and found that my CPU temperature would idle around 60 and the SAS2 chip would idle even higher, around 85 degrees. Pushing the system at all would put both into temperatures that made me too uncomfortable to call acceptable. I have my board in a U-NAS 810A chassis, so I don't have a lot of mounting options for case fans to do the heavy lifting for me, so I went for fans mounted on the heatsinks themselves.

CPU Temperatures:
For the CPU, I ended up picking up the SNK-C0057A4L ($36) as a drop-in replacement, but the FAN was a little whinny, so I replaced with the stock fan with a GELID Silent5 FN-SX05-40 ($6). So I'm $42 extra in, but CPU temperatures are under control. I was in the low 30's idle initially, so I threw a spare Noctua NA-SRC10 (3-pin LNA resistor) on the fan to get the system a little more silent (I tried this on the stock fan prior to swapping, but it was still whinny even at lower RPMs). Now I'm sitting at around 38 degrees idle, and around 45 degrees with a few VMs running. It's not "amazing" temperatures, but well within acceptable for this platform -- and virtually silent.

SAS2 Temperatures:
My issue is like the OP's, the SAS2 chipset is where I am having a harder time finding a good option. At 85-95 degrees depending on load, I'm just not comfortable with letting that be.

I had an extra GELID Silent5 FN-SX05-40 that I set on top of the chipset for now. This got me down to the 40's, I put a spare Ultra LNA resistor on the FAN and it leveled out around 50 degrees. What I learned is very little air-flow is needed to make a big difference on this chipset. With my ULNA, the FN-SX05-40 is running at 1800rpm and is putting out more than enough airflow to cut the temperature in half.

The problem is that I really don't like having the fan just resting on top of the heatsink like that. I've had to move the box around, and it slid off. So then I had to remove the chassis outer shell, which was a PITA, just to put it back in place. Overall, I would like to find something a little less ghetto.

Has anyone found a good, stock-like solution?
I don't know where to look for a product spec for the heatsink dimensions, and I'm not home this week to measure, but I was wondering if anyone knows of are any drop-in replacements for the SAS2 heatsink like there was for the CPU, but something with a fan (or fan mount option).

Maybe something like this:
Enzotech SLF-40(mm) Memory Cooling - Newegg.com

The product claims "multiple push pin locations for universal mounting on various board
assembly. (hole to hole distance 54.6mm and 59m)." Does this seem about the same push-pin layout dimensions? This option would be ideal for a 40mm Noctua replacement.

Or has anyone had any better luck with another solution that's not just sitting or taping a fan to a heatsink?