Noctua NH-D9 DX-3647 4U: A High-End Xeon Scalable Heatsink

Setting up the NH-D9 DX-3647 4U heatsink was quite easy with its SecuFirm2 mounting system albeit slightly more involved than the standard Xeon heatsinks pushed by the motherboard/system vendors, but this heatsink is more versatile with supporting both square and narrow LGA-3647 sockets, thus including both mounting brackets.

The Noctua NH-D9 DX-3647 4U testing was done with a Xeon Silver 4108. The Intel Xeon Silver 4108 processor is an eight-core part with Hyper Threading (16 total threads), 1.8GHz base frequency, 3.0GHz turbo frequency, six channel DDR4-2400 memory support, and an 85 Watt TDP.

The heatsink and processor were mounted on a Tyan Tempest HX S7100 S7100AG2NR motherboard, which features the "narrow" LGA-3647 socket design. The heatsink was easy to setup and mounted fine with this system configuration without any problems.

This Intel Xeon Silver server was running Intel's Clear Linux distribution. Via the Phoronix Test Suite the CPU core temperature was monitored while running a variety of single and multi-threaded workloads in a fully-automated and reproducible fashion. The Noctua NH-D9 DX-3647 4U's thermal performance was compared to the Supermicro SNK-P0068APS4 CPU heatsink fan that was previously in use with this system inside the Roseweill 4U chassis.