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

The SNK-P0068APS4 was tested while its fan was running at its full speed. The Noctua NH-D9 DX-3647 4U was tested both when at full-speed and then when configured via the BIOS to utilize Auto Fan Control with a 15% minimum duty cycle. Tests were done with the same hardware in the same 4U environment while running the same benchmarks in the same manner via the Phoronix Test Suite. Through the Phoronix Test Suite were about four hours worth of CPU benchmarks run on each heatsink to stress the system under a wide variety of conditions.

That's an overall look at the CPU core temperature during the roughly four hours of stress on each of the heatsinks/configurations. The SNK-P0068APS4 led to an average temperature of 31C at its full fan-speed while the Noctua NH-D9 DX-3647 4U had an average temperature of 23.5C with its fans at their full speed or 38.8C when using the automatic fan control enabled via the BIOS. The minimum and maximum core temperatures were also aligned with expectations. The Noctua heatsink did a nice job of allowing this Intel Xeon Silver CPU to run extremely cool inside this 4U chassis even at full load.

A look at some of the individual test results for more clarity:

From compiling the Linux kernel to running Python scripts to the many other workloads tested, the Noctua Xeon Scalable 4U heatsink was doing a great job at keeping the system running cool, especially at full-speed but even with the automatic fan control it was doing a great job. Even at full-speed, the NF-A9 fans were barely audible outside of the steel Rosewill 4U chassis, especially if you are running multiple systems in the room. Overall very happy with the NH-D9 DX-3647 4U heatsink and these numbers would indicate it's also very capable of cooling the even more powerful Xeon Gold and Platinum models. The only downside of the Xeon Scalable heatsinks from Noctua are their price, which is at ~$90 USD/EUR in the respective markets.