Finding An Affordable Heatsink For A High Wattage CPU In A 4U Chassis

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Finding An Affordable Heatsink For A High Wattage CPU In A 4U Chassis

For the past several months I've been using a Scythe Mugen Max heatsink on one of my Core i7 5960X Haswell-E systems. That heatsink has been working out great, but the only problem is that it's too big -- particularly if trying to fit it in a 4U chassis. In needing to cool this 140 Watt CPU while moving the system into a 4U rackmount chassis, I ended up trying out the much cheaper and smaller Freezer i11 from Arctic Cooling.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=22189

[nslay]

I have the same cooler as you. It's still pretty big although it works well.

Here's another option:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835103177

59mm tall.

The official website does not list LGA 2011 as supported. But if you zoom into the picture of the box on Newegg, you can see LGA 2011 listed.

[CrystalGamma]

Just a thought: if you have problems with the electricity use of your systems, maybe you should buy more efficient CPUs instead of bigger heatsinks?

[duch]

He is speaking about TDP Watts (= heat generation), not power consumption Watts. There is nothing about electricity use in this article.

And he actually bought and used a heatsink way smaller than the previous one.

[tomtomme]

Just a thought: if you have problems with the electricity use of your systems, maybe you should buy more efficient CPUs instead of bigger heatsinks?

the purpose of his benchmarking farm is to benchmark all kind of hardware with all kind of software for the opensource devs to find performance regressions - also on old but still used hardware. If Micheal would only benchmark the newest most efficient stuff, there would have been no need for a benchmark farm at all. He could have kept on going like he did before, just testing selected stuff at selected points in time.

[utack]

Just a thought: if you have problems with the electricity use of your systems, maybe you should buy more efficient CPUs instead of bigger heatsinks?

That does not help when Intel intentionally lets them run hot with cheap thermal paste instead of solder.

[MNKyDeth]

That does not help when Intel intentionally lets them run hot with cheap thermal paste instead of solder.

The "-E" series of cpu's from Intel like the 5960X use solder between the chip and heat spreader. Only the consumer class cpu's get the crappy thermal paste between the heatspreader and chip. I just wanted to clarify that....

Also... what I did for my 4u server build was water cool it. It was just the cpu that I was cooling so I bought a Logisys 4u case. It's a rather deep case a swiftech 350x pump with a mini res on top of it. An alphacool NexXxoS XT45 240mm rad and the cheapest EK cpu water block I could find. I have it all stuffed in the case with plenty of room to spare surprisingly. My cpu in that server very rarely gets anywhere near what I call hot. I havn't looked at it in like a year so not sure where the temps are on it on average. But I am sure it's better than any normal heatsink.
I only posted this part as water cooling can give you a very small footprint for excellent cooling above and around the cpu location. You just move the cooling bits to other parts of the case as needed.

[Michael]

He is speaking about TDP Watts (= heat generation), not power consumption Watts. There is nothing about electricity use in this article.

And he actually bought and used a heatsink way smaller than the previous one.

Plus the fact that I get nearly all my Intel CPUs (including this one) for free....

[wazoo42]

I realize you are not in the business of testing HSF units (as you state in the article), but have you contacted Coolchip to see if they would give you samples of their Kinetic cooler?

http://coolchiptechnologies.com/kinetic-cooling/

[wazoo42]

I would also like to say thank you for posting this article Michael. I have two 5960X boxes running computational quantum mechanics (MOLPRO) 24/7 and would love to get away from water cooling (Corsair H100i). They are currently between 48 and 60 C at full load (depending on the type of calculation) and turbo boost ratcheting them up to 3.5 GHz.