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Cooling the 2U Gaming Build

After sharing my previous build, I had a lot of questions around cooling performance. And due to the low thermal headroom I had (temps peaking at 95 degrees even with PBO disabled, although not thermal throttling), I wanted to improve the cooling situation.

I had two options, going for a water cooling route which would be able to work around the RAM/CPU position, or replace the motherboard and cooler that is more designed for a rack mounted server chassis.

You can see that the RAM blocks airflow to the CPU, and the CPU fan also has barely enough clearance to the lid of the chassis. The VRM heatsinks also traps a lot of the hot air around the CPU.

After some research on the water cooling route, I decided that I would give air cooling a try first, because my chassis was a bit awkward to fit any 80mm AIOs.

Unboxing
Installed

Few concerns out of the box was that I wouldn't be able to use the front USB3 ports because of GPU clearance, and the mobo also only had one NVMe slot.

For the USB 3 issue, I ordered an L-shape adapter from Amazon.

NVMe issue was really annoying. My previous motherboard had 2 NVMe slots, a 1TB for the OS and a 4TB for files such as my Steam library. So to make the setup of the new motherboard easy, I had to install the 1TB OS drive for the time being.

Luckily, this motherboard has a 4x PCIe slot that seemed to barely have just enough clearance from the GPU for me to install an NVMe expansion card, and I bought the tiniest one I could find to make sure I don't run into clearance issues.

The cooling performance was instantly noticeable: Temps peaked at 85 degrees (down from 95) and I re-enabled PBO as well and saw the CPU draw as much as 150W while still staying below 90. Noise wasn't a concern as well - the cooler is more than capable of maintaining below 90 under load, and I've also configured the fan curve to be aggressively quiet, where it stays under 35% PWM for essentially forever.

Fan is controlled on the IPMI. Unfortunately, Asrock's BMC does not allow you to go any lower than 20%. But at 20% it's really quiet, there are other louder things in my rack.

So at the end of the day, was this exercise worth it?

Part Cost
AsRock Rack B650D4U-2L2T/BCM $419.00
Dynatron A47 $45.95
SilverStone ECM28 PCIe NVMe adapter $18.87
90 degree USB 3.0 front header adapter $6.99

It costed roughly a $500, but I'd say it was definitely worth it:

  • System runs much cooler, faster, and quieter. The noise is pretty much the same at idle, but noticeably quiet during load as I don't need to ramp up the RPM as high.
  • 2 x 10GbE ports, upgraded from previous motherboard's 2.5GbE. This is quite valuable because the 2U has no room for any expansion cards.

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