Passive Cooling; Am I asking for trouble?

[rwslippey]

Finally got all my parts together and my latest build up, which is a huge step forward compared to my last build.

I bought a used X9SCL-F and Xeon E3-1230 V2.
The board came with a passive cooler, no fan.

For now I have an extra CPU fan zip tied to the passive cooler, just to be safe but it is load as all get out!

The case isn't a small case and isn't packed very dense. The case supports 8 drive (plus 3 3.5 bays) I currently have 6 drives in it.
I've got 2 fans pushing in the front and (accross the drives) and 1 exhausting out the read. There are 2 top side fan mounts and a fan mount on the door. (both are open at this time)

I'm still undecided on Plex but this thing does serve up media currently, but only as a file server to a Pi for Kodi, no transcoding is done by the Nas.

So my question is; Do I really need that fan on the CPU? Do you think I'm being paranoid? Will FreeNas shut itself down if it thinks it's getting too hot and can I control these temperature settings?


Thanks

Rob

 

[m0nkey_]

The Xeon E3-1230 needs to be actively cooled, so you need some airflow going over it. If it didn't come with a fan, it's likely it was in a 1U chassis with a couple of 40mm fans blowing at it.

 

[tvsjr]

Any modern processor will throttle itself if it gets warm. If it still can't stay cool enough, it will eventually crash hard.

As m0nkey_ pointed out, the Xeons really expect airflow... either via the wind tunnel configuration of a rack mount server or a fan-based cooler. If that passive cooler is fairly small (think the size of the chip), it was intended for a rack-mount server. If it's ginormous, then it might work. That chip has a 69W TDP... that's a LOT of heat to deal with passively.

Try this from the command line:

Code:

sysctl -a |egrep -E "cpu\.[0-9]+\.temp"

That should give you temps of every CPU core.

IMO, replace the cooler with something with a fan. That board should have PWM headers for the CPU cooler fan - make sure you buy a compatible unit so the system can slow the fan down when the box is idling.

 

[rwslippey]

Thanks for the replies,

That was kind of what I was figuring. Thanks for all your thoughts. like you both said, I'm pretty sure it came out of a rack (guy sold a bunch of them.)

Thanks again...

Off to find a cooler!