Construkt

If you're gaming on it, I don't think there is such a thing as "overkill".

So this is a bit of an odd situation. I didn't intend on upgrading my server any time soon, but due to ongoing circumstances, involving the acquisition of a 3080 for my desktop, I seem to be at a point where it would make the most sense to just upgrade now. I found a deal where I could pick up a full desktop for ~$2200 with an included 3080, which suits my needs. I wanted to pick it up before my 1080ti lost any more resale value. That said, I ordered a machine that will be here next month with the following specs: CPU: Intel i7-11700K Mobo: GIGABYTE Z590 UD AC ATX Memory: 16GB (8GBx2) DDR4/3200MHz Memory [-40] (Team T-Force Delta RGB) PSU: Thermaltake Toughpower GF1 Series 750W 80 PLUS GOLD Ultra Quiet Full Modular Power Supply GPU: GeForce RTX™ 3080 10GB GDDR6X SSD: 1TB WD Blue SN550 Series PCIe NVMe M.2 SSD It initially came with an 11600KF, but I noticed that when one of my friends was streaming from Plex (he's always playing something) it was transcoding and just him streaming would eat up 90% of my CPU. So I figured I needed something with an IGP to deal with that and I upgraded the option (not the most cost-effective method, I know, but I didn't want to sell the 11600KF and buy something else because it'd take a lot of time and effort for a small savings). Anyways, I did that after I had thought about what I was going to do with the rest of the machine once I got my GPU out of it. I was going to part it out and sell it after I took the case for my main desktop (just changing from a Phanteks P400A to a P500A), but then I got to thinking how old my server components were and how I was bottlenecking. My current server specs are: CPU: Intel® Xeon® CPU E3-1230 V2 @ 3.30GHz Mobo: Supermicro X9SCL RAM: 32GB DDR3 Single-bit ECC Storage: Samsung 850 Pro 512GB SSD (cache), 6 8TB WD Reds (White labeled shucked drives actually but more or less the same), 8TB WD Gold (parity), and a 4TB WD drive a friend gave me. I'm using it as a Plex server set up with Ombi, reverse proxy for requests, and radarr/sonarr/bazaar/lidarr (all the arr's) to make a complete and easily accessible media library for my friends and family. It's worked great for quite awhile now, but the bottlenecking has me concerned. I'm also running out of space and my little Fractal Node 304 can't take much more. Heat is becoming an issue and I can't put any more drives in there. With the announcement of the Steam Deck I also want to move my RetroPie roms onto the server and have them remotely accessible, so speeding up access with faster drives and networking is becoming more important. Then I noticed the behemoth of a Fractal Define XL R2 Silent case that I have taking up the corner of my office that I was planning on finally recycling, and thought I could transfer my server into that. Well with all of the parts I have coming, I may as well just take everything I'm not going to use in the CyberPower PC build I bought and just slap it all in there and make it a server upgrade. I could swap out the 512GB cache drive for the faster 1TB NVME SSD, get an IGP, a much faster processor (less RAM, but I don't think I need 32GB), and otherwise just switch to consumer oriented hardware. I picked up a few 8TB IronWolf 7200RPM drives and a couple of hot swap bays that fit in my 5.25" bays on the larger case to fit 6 additional drives as apparently hard drive cages are impossible to find now. I even finally picked up a APC 1000VA Smart UPS to make this upgrade complete. All of this sounded great, but I started looking into the power consumption and heat production of the 11700K and now I'm getting a little worried that this thing is going to cook. The turbo boosts push the 11700K up to 250W TDP and even if I invested in an AIO cooler, I'm not sure that I want or need the server drawing that much. I've already spent more money than I ever should have on this, but once I was on a roll I kept nickel and diming my credit card to try to finish it. I know I'll miss having IPMI and I already had to order an internal USB adapter to get the Unraid OS inside the box, but I'm trying not to miss anything. Is there something I can do to limit the power draw on the processor without making things unstable (undervolting), or is there a better configuration with what I have at hand?

The problem is that all this is packed inside a Node 304. I picked up 3 more Noctua fans and have yet to install them but I think it will help quite a bit. Only Disk 7 skyrockets in temp, though. I've seen it climb into the mid 50's.

I noticed that Disk 7 had been running really hot and i never really paid too much attention to the writes/reads, as it was the last drive I installed. However, as they kept creeping up, I noticed that it became way out of line compared to anything else. It's the newest drive and has by far the most reads and almost as many writes as my parity drive, which is just insane. I imagine it is driving the heat up on every other drive near it, which I think are drives 2, 3, and 5. Currently running Unraid 6.8.3, Intel Xeon E3-1230 V2, Supermicro X9SCM, 32GB RAM. I'm running a Plex docker with Sonarr, Radarr, Lidarr, Bazarr, and a reverse proxy with Letsencrypt and DucksDNS as well as Ombi to manage requests. The drive in question only has TV shows and movies on it. All Appdata is on the cache drive, so there shouldn't be any problem there. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. tower-diagnostics-20201222-1144.zip