I picked this up for $300 off craigslist. I think I did pretty good compared to new. I considered JDM’s recommendation for the 25U open frame very heavily but I was really set on something enclosed to help with sound deadening. I plan to add some sound absorbing foam on the inside but for now I am just running it normal so its still really loud. I am considering framing and sheet-rocking in a “closet” around it (in my basement) to further help reduce the noise.
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Probably better off baffling it all around with foam or something and making sure your air flow is solid. The more impediments you have to airflow and the better you sound insulate, you also insulate thermally.
I personally would avoid any type of foam inside an enclosed frame.
I was thinking I would imitate one of these much more expensive “quiet” rack solutions with the foam lining but I welcome any advice. All I know is momma aint happy with the current noise level.
I have of course considered lower decibel power supplies but that seems inefficient to my brain as a quiet rack and/or a quiet room will be quiet no matter what future servers and equipment I put in it.
Noise is best reduced at the server level, not at the rack/cabinet level. Eliminate the source of noise, don’t put a band-aid on something that’s loud.
Most of our builds here keep that in mind, and you should have no problems making a quiet or silent server build.
Is that an 846 in there? SQ PSUs and Arctic P8 on the fanwall?
@seanho no its an 848A with the 4x CPU setup. When I ordered it from the server store I was hoping for more horsepower and cores for virtual machines in my homelab and it was trivially more than the 846 dual cpu setup. The main problem is it uses different power supplies than the 846. I have 3x of the PWS-1k21P-1R 1200W. Can I swap those out for the PWS-920P-SQ? Unraid says I am using 900W nominal power but I think thats based off the UPS:
Something else worth mentioning, although I ordered this with 4x CPU I ordered it with zero memory and traded a friend for 128 GB of DDR3 ECC. To make a long story short, I eventually came to the conclusion (out of the short serverstore warranty) that my motherboard has a bad RAM dimm slot. When I follow the RAM population instructions in the manual I get to the same slot and if I fill it the machine wont post. This limits me to ~60 GB of memory and I cant run the virtual machines I wanted anyway so now I just have a very loud and energy hungry NAS that I can run containers and only a single virtual machine on.
I bought the artic P8s for the fanwall modification but I stopped myself as I seem to have thermal struggles with the fans that in this unit to begin with and I am concerned they wont push enough air.
Kinda hot for a nice cool fall morning in my basement…
Also my NAS is where my Plex, Jellyfin, and handbrake containers are and I know its really inefficient since I cant use quicksync or even CUDA to help encoding. Should I just replace that 4 CPU motherboard in that machine with something more quiet/efficient?
If you don’t need all of that computing horsepower and you want something for hardware transcoding, check out the OTiS build guide. It uses more modern Intel CPUs so you can utilize QuickSync. Of course, that’s assuming your SuperMicro chassis has the standard mounting locations for mATX/ATX boards. And it’ll be much more power efficient than your quad CPU rig too, and cooler too so you could swap those fans.
Your drive temps are fine. Switch to C.
Try the black slot corresponding to the bad blue slot. Also try leaving that entire channel empty and using other memory channels (other blue slots). The RAM configs don’t have to match exactly across CPUs.
I believe both the 920 SQ and the 1200 R use the old-style PDB. It’s the 1280 SQ that needs the newer PDB.
very late UPDATE - I recently gave got fed up with the noise, well I should say my wife’s complaints were more the problem ;-P, and I pulled the trigger and purchased those 920SQ power supplies. I just received and installed them. OMG what a difference. Thank you for the excellent advice all.
Now I have a lot invested in this case/system, in the nearish future I hope to replace the motherboard, cpu, memory for something more powerful and efficient.