Corsair Vengeance Airflow Memory Cooling For DDR5 Server RAM

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Corsair Vengeance Airflow Memory Cooling For DDR5 Server RAM

For those building your own server around the new Intel Xeon 6 "Granite Rapids" or AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" platforms and using DDR5-6000/DDR5-6400 memory (or the interesting MRDIMM-8000 memory with Xeon 6 P), one of the factors you need to be much more mindful about than in the past is that at least the initial generation of DDR5-6000+ memory is running much hotter than prior server memory. There's been guidance from Intel and AMD as well as sever vendors about the thermal considerations with DDR5-6000/DDR5-6400 and extra precautions. Here's a look at the DDR5-6000 thermals on a recent AMD EPYC 9655 Turin server build and then taming the DDR5 server memory modules using Corsair Vengeance Airflow Memory Cooling Fans.

https://www.phoronix.com/review/corsair-ddr5-ram-cooling-server

[schmidtbag]

That's a surprisingly big difference. Makes me wonder if modules that come with heatsinks need active cooling too.

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

Pretty cool for a 4U chassis where it fits .

[MNKyDeth]

I am unaware of any ramsinks that can fit DDR5 ECC memory. Since the PMIC stand out a good bit more then standard DDR5 you risk shorting out the ram using a ramsink on them.
I am also not sure how many people/companies would buy heatsinks for the ram itself. I run a Xeon myself with DDR5 Kinston Fury Renegade Pro. I had a shop make a custom set of copper ramsinks for me where I could mount any random ram water block to the top of them.

My next step is looking into doing nickel plating to protect the copper and it will look better.

[user556]

I thought the average server was a wind-tunnel already. Maybe this is more about workstation type setups.

[Riotvan]

I wonder how much this can be an issue on desktops with blowthrough gpu coolers exhausting on the ram. Perhaps it’s mitigated with air cooling on the cpu but i can see many setups where people mess up the airflow in their case leading to issues. Maybe they run an aio and all they want to hear is pump noise and no airflow.

[coder]

That's a surprisingly big difference. Makes me wonder if modules that come with heatsinks need active cooling too.

It's worth considering that Michael was cooling the DIMMs with air preheated by 500W from the CPU, due to his placement of the 360 mm liquid cooling radiator.

Source: https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewe...ne_epyc_10_lrg

These types of cases are probably designed to have storage devices up front, but that would normally account for less than 100W or so. I think a 500W thermal load would definitely cause the chassis designers to at least make some accommodations.

I wonder how much his baseline temps would drop, if he'd just somehow prop the radiator up, so that cool air could flow underneath it. A better solution would surely be to reverse the airflow of the entire case, although you'd probably also want those exhaust (now intake) fans to be sitting at the same level as the memory.

Something you normally find in prebuilt servers are flow guides to direct air over & between the memory DIMMs, which is one reason they're arranged as they are (i.e. along the length of the chassis).

In any case, if Michael continues using this chassis as is, then it definitely seems like he'd better keep using those DRAM coolers with it! This does raise a lot of questions about prior benchmarks on that hardware, such as the memory-scaling analysis:

https://www.phoronix.com/review/8-12-channel-epyc-9005

In particular, I wonder how the Stream benchmarks would be affected.

[coder]

I wonder how much this can be an issue on desktops with blowthrough gpu coolers exhausting on the ram. Perhaps it’s mitigated with air cooling on the cpu but i can see many setups where people mess up the airflow in their case leading to issues. Maybe they run an aio and all they want to hear is pump noise and no airflow.

I prefer top-down coolers, because they provide some direct airflow on the RAM and VRM. Also, they subject the motherboard to less torque than tower-style coolers, when the motherboard is oriented vertically.

Sadly, the best air coolers are always towers, but the Noctua NH-C14S is still pretty decent:

https://noctua.at/en/products/cpu-cooler-retail/nh-c14s

I upgraded mine by using their oversized 150 mm fan, which leaks a bit of cool air over the sides.

[Sonadow]

Can't be arsed to cool my memory.

If need be I'll just buy slower DDR5 memory like 4800 or even lower. I'm only interested in the memory quantity for my computers, not the performance.

[Michael]

It's worth considering that Michael was cooling the DIMMs with air preheated by 500W from the CPU, due to his placement of the 360 mm liquid cooling radiator.

Source: https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewe...ne_epyc_10_lrg

These types of cases are probably designed to have storage devices up front, but that would normally account for less than 100W or so. I think a 500W thermal load would definitely cause the chassis designers to at least make some accommodations.

I wonder how much his baseline temps would drop, if he'd just somehow prop the radiator up, so that cool air could flow underneath it. A better solution would surely be to reverse the airflow of the entire case, although you'd probably also want those exhaust (now intake) fans to be sitting at the same level as the memory.

Something you normally find in prebuilt servers are flow guides to direct air over & between the memory DIMMs, which is one reason they're arranged as they are (i.e. along the length of the chassis).

In any case, if Michael continues using this chassis as is, then it definitely seems like he'd better keep using those DRAM coolers with it! This does raise a lot of questions about prior benchmarks on that hardware, such as the memory-scaling analysis:

https://www.phoronix.com/review/8-12-channel-epyc-9005

In particular, I wonder how the Stream benchmarks would be affected.

The prior 8 vs. 12 channel benchmarks were using the RAM coolers already... I bought these coolers like the day of assembling the Supermicro server.

Also FWIW, the AMD Volcano 2U reference server for Turin is also using radiator for dual sockets in front of the RAM slots as well.