Well the time is growing near! My Dual Athlon is reaching retirement age ( 2 years old), and is about to be sent into other uses (everyone needs a dual 1.4Ghz file server with 1Gb of ram dont they? hehehe). So my next major project/machine is being developed...
Currently its planned to be a Dual 2.66 - 2.8 Ghz Xeon, w/2GB of CL2 PC2700, and using my existing 3x36GB U160 SCSI array. The machine will have hardware U320 RAID ( dual channel), Gbit Ethernet, and use my existing Sony 500XA DVD+/-R Writer / AOpen DVD ROM. All this will sit in my Chenbro Junior case I have my Dual Athlon in. This is my main workstation/gaming rig, and for now will sport my Ti4600 Golden Sample board ( works just fine currently), in Fall I will be upgrading to what ever is the bestest... more than likely an ATi board ( if nV keeps being retarded that is... I have no need for a product from a company that is more concerned about lying to its customers, than improving their product... but I digress)
Why no Opteron? simple... 64bit is still a pipe dream.. just cause AMD released a 64bit chip doesnt mean there will be jack to run on it... remember DEC? yeh their AXP rocked it all... (/me Alpha fan boy) yet was never meant and barely got its nose into even the Windows server market. to get 64bit to be worth the investment on a PC there needs to be a well established app offering. Buying hardware before there is a need for it just asks for you to be totally obsolete by the time there is a useful app wrote. but I digree again
Now... here comes the question... Silent cooling of 2 Xeon CPU's. I work around high end multi processor Xeon boxes daily.. they are ANYTHING but quiet, infact some of them are well over the 60dB OSHA limit for working around for extended periods of time.
Some ideas I am pondering:
1. Dell PowerEdge 2600 Heatsinks. These are impressive Heatsinks to say the least... 3 heat pipes rising from a hard to ID material at its base, probably copper, up through a mesh of paper thin aluminum fins all the way up about 6" tall. Very impressive and well designed HSF's. using these with a hand made air tunnel with some nice low speed 120mm fans pulling air past them could result in a very quiet and very efficient cooling.
Problem: getting the HSF's is hard... working my contacts at Dell and have had no success at all. (you’d think someone who has purchasing authority and has pushed to order well over 300,000$ in hardware this year alone from them would get some service!
)
2. Swiftec Socket 603 (Xeon) HSF. This is the prime "normal" HSF I am looking at. since its got the mountings for the socket 603, it wont be hard to get this setup working. Pondering doing a 92mm to 80mm conversion and do some testing with having a slower 92mm sucking air trough the HSF with a small skirt around the top of the HSF similar to what Alpha does with their HSF's. I do believe that its better to suck air through the HSF rather than blow into it from a systems stand point. Blowing air through just throws very hot air onto all your system components, where sucking the air past the HSF will give you the ability to route the heat out of the case, and keep other system components/video card nice and cool. Only problem is these HSF's are damn heavy... and when I haul this rig to LAN's its already freaking heavy enough as is
3.Modify a P4 Alpha to fit on a Xeon mounting point. for all the reasons above.
4. Water.... Now I want to explain that I do NOT want water in this rig. I am a firm believer that quiet air cooling can give me everything I want and at a fraction of the price/complexity/time investment in setup and maint. So I overall do NOT want to go with this option.
So that’s that, over the next months I am going to be buying all the parts for this rather massive investment in hardware, but when I am done it should be a rig capable to handle'n what ever physics/reality that any game throws at it
there will be an article wrote about the cooling of this beast since I know MANY people are upgrading later this summer in preparation for HL2 and D3. What you think this is for?!
hehe
let me know what your thoughts are on cooling 2 DAMN hot CPU's like this in a small space