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@SSD

Perfection is impossible, If you turn the fan on the CPU on the right to point up, and added an exhaust fan up there, while having a couple of intake fans on the front to get cool air into the case, I think your cooling would be much more effective.

 

Unfortunately, the heatsink + aircooler (PHM) doesn't allow me to point it "up", it can be either left or right, but what I could do is following your suggestion of installing a couple of ring fans at the top to exhaust the warm air from there. That will do it. It's like you said, perfection is impossible but that should be the best I can with the components I have, to drive the hot air out of the chassis.

 

The good thing is that the chassis is a Tempered Glass 91 RGB from ThermalTake, full modular. It's a gigantic freaking case. You can install an insane amount of chassis fans, top, bottom, front and back.

http://ttpremium.com/product/thermaltake-view-91-tempered-glass-rgb-edition-super-tower-chassis/

 

Again, thanks for the recommendations! It's helping a lot.

Right now I will try to solve the thermal paste issue first and face the heatsink the right direction. That's the step number 1.

Then later, I will start thinking of getting more fans for the top to improve airflow efficiency following the diagram you posted.

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28 minutes ago, SSD said:

 

If you want a person to get a notification when you mention their name, make sure to put an "@" in front. The name should then get highlighted like @SSD. If it looks like SSD or @SSD it is just text and will not contact anyone. Just FYI.

Sorry about that.

 

28 minutes ago, SSD said:

I always replace the thermal pad with Arctic Silver 5. There are other brands that you can investigate, but I have had good luck with this one and tend to stick with it.

 

The trouble with the pads is that they are made of wax, and if you use one, the wax melts. This can make is difficult to fully remove the compound. But I'd still try and replace with a thermal compound. I use the arctic 2 step cleaner and some of THESE to clean the old compound. They are the best I've found. They are a little pricey so I usually get CPU and HSF as clean as I can with a qtip, and then use one of these with the arctic cleaner. It is amazing how much compound it will pick up after thorough cleaning with qtip.

 

It's a little hard to see where the air intake is. The CPU above left looks good. (Assuming that fan to the left of it is exhausting air).  It is very similar to how mine is setup. The CPU to the right that is blowing air to the front of the case is not as good. I'd likely turn it facing up (towards top of case) if that is an option. And install an exhaust fan on the case top. Air should come in from the front and maybe bottom. I think it will cool well.

 

(I'm assuming your fans are mounted the right way - I am looking at the little white labels on top showing air flow direction).

 

Here I attached the same picture, with some arrows showing how I had it before I removed the one in the right. So yea, the left one looks good to me, the one I need to rotate 180 degrees is the right one to point to the same direction as the left one, so all the air should be exhausted to the rear of the chassis. In the front there are 3 rings that should get the intake.

 

I will try using Artic Silver 5 instead of the pad, I just got a message from supermicro customer support and they are not selling the thermal pad separately.
So I will try to spread the paste to cover most of the cpu area. Agreed about the wax, it took me a while to fully clean it and remove the wax, it's gets really messy.

Especially I'm trying to avoid touching the bottom part of cpu, the golden contacts, really hard to handle.

 

Alright, thanks much! I really appreciate your advice. I will let you know how it goes. This week the GPU should be arriving and I should be all set.

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On 3/7/2018 at 2:45 PM, uaeproz said:

@SSD

 

here is the update 

 

 

 

Hello SSD,

 

Got a quick question for you since you seem very experienced building servers.

To give a little bit of background for my question, I started building my new workstation rig which it has similar components to your server, but instead of mounting the X11DAI-N in a server rack, I mounted it in a Tower Chassis. I'm also a beginner building workstations or dealing with pc parts, so that it's stressing me out.

I attached 2 pictures for reference.

 

So I built and installed the PHM, SNK-P0070APS4 with a Xeon Silver 4114 (10-cores) following the instructions and I quickly realized that there was something wrong with the direction of the airflow I set up. Both air coolers were pointing to opposite directions and I thought I made a mistake.

I read out there that the ideal airflow is to make them go in the same direction (Not sure if this is actually true), the intake air from the front and exhaust the air to the rear of the chassis. So I thought "- I have to disassemble one of the PHM." So I did.

 

But, I cannot find anywhere in the internet, where I can buy a replacement of the "thermal pad" that the supermicro heatsink includes pre applied

Do you know where I could possible buy it?

Are there any other alternatives, like applying thermal paste (Artict Silver 5) instead of buying the pad? I had some of those.

 

I started to get a little bit desperate because I cannot finish my build.

Also, I unfortunately disassembled and cleaned the thermal paste before I looked at this post and some of you pictures.

I'm afraid I took it out with no reason now.

 

Well, that's the situation I'm dealing with. Hopefully I would not burn the processors.

 

Thank you! I will appreciate any help or suggestions about this.