I have a PE T610 that sounds like a jet on hot days :emotion-6:
But my server will soon be decomissioned so I am considering redeploying it for home duties. However it needs to be much much quieter for it to be usabel at home. As such, I'm looking at new fans (which likely requires resetting the IDRAC fan thresholds) or water cooling or both. In any case, for me it will be a 'fun' project or a 'frustrating' project, just not sure which one at the moment [:?]
With water cooling, other than the mechanical issues which are the easy things to resolve, you still need fans to blow air through the radiators and you also need airflow through the server itself. This airflow through the server is required and expected as it's used to cool the memory, HDD's and the many certified PCIe cards that can reside inside. And as most cards don't have fans, since fans are a single point of failure in a machine that is built for uptime, the solution is to use heatsinks on the cards and require the server to provide the need good airflow (and lots of it). Just look at the required cubic feet per minute needs of some of intels 4x gb network cards just to get an idea of what is expected.
Unfortunately lots of hardware and PCIe cards = lots of needed cubic feet per minute air flow which equals lots of noise. And water cooling can't resolve this airflow needs if you use fanless PCIe cards! There is simlply now way around that.
Added to this is the fact that IDRAC controls fan speed based on internal components (RAM, HDD, PCIe cards, etc) that Dell has certified for use in a the server. Thus the firmware knows about what's installed and what airflow is required to meet Dells cooling design. If some card is not 'known' by the firmware, then the fans are made to go hard to ensure that noting will fail due to heat. The design on these older servers places cooling and thus reliability above noise.
If you swap the fans for some quieter slower spinning units, you may have found the fans hunt between high and low speeds as the firmware thinks they are spinning too slow and about to stall so increases them for a short while and then slows them. This hunting repeats ad nauseam. You may also get low fan speed threshold alarms during the process.
Understanding how IDRAC firmware works in terms of cooling vrs installed components vrs temperatures is criticall in modifying the cooling within teh server hardware and firmware (or even attempting to fool it in some way). And Dell will not help with getting such knowledge (but your mileage may be different).
So it's a big job to reverse enginner and then re-engineer the firmware so that it will elegantly cope with water cooling and lower airflows, PCIe cards with active cooling (fans) and unknow (non certified) hardware (with their varied cooling needs). One i haven't looked into in detail yet.
Being that you have a R910, which is a big beats using big fans, quieter fans should be easyer to source but read the following sites which may give you some further ideas. These referenced pages may help to either resolve your noise issue using just airflow or a combination of airflow and water cooling:
skylarking
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September 8th, 2015 00:00
I have a PE T610 that sounds like a jet on hot days :emotion-6:
But my server will soon be decomissioned so I am considering redeploying it for home duties. However it needs to be much much quieter for it to be usabel at home. As such, I'm looking at new fans (which likely requires resetting the IDRAC fan thresholds) or water cooling or both. In any case, for me it will be a 'fun' project or a 'frustrating' project, just not sure which one at the moment [:?]
With water cooling, other than the mechanical issues which are the easy things to resolve, you still need fans to blow air through the radiators and you also need airflow through the server itself. This airflow through the server is required and expected as it's used to cool the memory, HDD's and the many certified PCIe cards that can reside inside. And as most cards don't have fans, since fans are a single point of failure in a machine that is built for uptime, the solution is to use heatsinks on the cards and require the server to provide the need good airflow (and lots of it). Just look at the required cubic feet per minute needs of some of intels 4x gb network cards just to get an idea of what is expected.
Unfortunately lots of hardware and PCIe cards = lots of needed cubic feet per minute air flow which equals lots of noise. And water cooling can't resolve this airflow needs if you use fanless PCIe cards! There is simlply now way around that.
Added to this is the fact that IDRAC controls fan speed based on internal components (RAM, HDD, PCIe cards, etc) that Dell has certified for use in a the server. Thus the firmware knows about what's installed and what airflow is required to meet Dells cooling design. If some card is not 'known' by the firmware, then the fans are made to go hard to ensure that noting will fail due to heat. The design on these older servers places cooling and thus reliability above noise.
If you swap the fans for some quieter slower spinning units, you may have found the fans hunt between high and low speeds as the firmware thinks they are spinning too slow and about to stall so increases them for a short while and then slows them. This hunting repeats ad nauseam. You may also get low fan speed threshold alarms during the process.
Understanding how IDRAC firmware works in terms of cooling vrs installed components vrs temperatures is criticall in modifying the cooling within teh server hardware and firmware (or even attempting to fool it in some way). And Dell will not help with getting such knowledge (but your mileage may be different).
So it's a big job to reverse enginner and then re-engineer the firmware so that it will elegantly cope with water cooling and lower airflows, PCIe cards with active cooling (fans) and unknow (non certified) hardware (with their varied cooling needs). One i haven't looked into in detail yet.
Being that you have a R910, which is a big beats using big fans, quieter fans should be easyer to source but read the following sites which may give you some further ideas. These referenced pages may help to either resolve your noise issue using just airflow or a combination of airflow and water cooling:
how-to-make-a-dell-poweredge-quieter
these-darn-fans
Good luck with your project and do post info of how you have reduced the fan noise to date and what you work out going forward.
Cheers.