[geeks] Dual Xeons - the Saga continues

[Mark Benson]

Progress...

I have installed a fan above the RAM because boy-oh-blimey does it get 
hot, it's held in with double-sided tape atm. The original fan baffle 
assembly doesn't quite fit at the moment (due to the monster heatsinks), 
I need to dremel off a bit of it then refit it with the fan attached to 
it (currently tie-wrapped to the back of the case).

I stuck a variable resistor in the main chassis fan circuit (the Noctua 
Industrial fan I bought) with and the board doesn't seem to mind. The 
variable only slows the fan down to about half speed so it'll never 
stop. Good thing. Stopping would be bad on this rig!

It is now booting Debian 9 from a 80GB Intel SSD, that all went 100% fine.

I ran the system with 'stress' on all 8 cores for 15 minutes and tested 
various manually set fan speeds and the like. I've found a balance point 
where the DIMMs and CPUs platau. CPUs are at about 70C (some diodes 
report lower) and the DIMMs at 55-60C (across 4 DIMMs). That's hot but 
I'm lead to believe not excessive for a very stressed Socket 771 rig. 
Importantly, they stay there and they aren't climbing, and warm air is 
exhausting.

As I'm not likely to run it that hard ever I'm not too concerned about 
the thermals. One interesting observation is at the moment running the 
chassis fan at full bore actually makes the DIMMs overheat because the 
RAM fan is suffering air starvation. That should change if I get the 
baffle back in and can force air over  the DIMMs and Northbridge.

I hooked up some SAS disks (in my neat little 5.25" 4x SAS bay) to the 
SAS ports and Debian recognises them - hurrah!

Shoved an Adaptec AEC-36160 (came out of the Dell I dismantled to rob 
the case) in the PCIX-133 slot because who doesn't want SCSI.

So it's coming together at last.

Still no luck finding monitoring software for the BMC. I am wondering if 
a thrid-party Linux-installed solution might work, anyone know anything 
of that ilk?

Still to do is install M4-M4 studs (Because Apple use Metric heatsink 
mounts, just to be awkward) in the motherboard tray to stop the CPU 
heatsinks pulling down on the mainboard. That'll require a major strip 
down and they aren't here yet so it'll have to stay as-is for now.

This feels like progress for sure. I'm just waiting for something to for 
wrong... ;)

-- 


Mark Benson