5 ms·

> Last AMD generation was 250W, this one is 280W: if we’re not there already, then this should be a practical limit. A good point for people looking to use thi

> Last AMD generation was 250W, this one is 280W: if we’re not there already, then this should be a practical limit. A good point for people looking to use this in their home server like I am. It’s going to be really hot if you’re getting your money out of it. At some point there’s not an efficient way to cool these processors when the ambient room temperature rises too high. Anyone have suggestions for that? I’m in a weird position where power is cheap but I can’t AC my garage (where it’s located).

wil421 7y ago
I’ve seen people on YouTube build a wood box around a small rack, put a bathroom fan inside, and run a foil hose for a dryer to the outside. The racks I saw already had a glass door so it was easier to build the sides and foil tap the cracks.
mgalgs 7y ago
How about some good old fans? I had a little NAS box in my garage for a few years that ran pretty hot and I was afraid of straining the hard disks. I ended up just using lm_sensors on the server to monitor temperature, and when it got it hot, kick off an SSH command to a raspberry pi sitting nearby to tell it to turn on an exterior fan (gpio -> mosfet -> relay) I had mounted to the side of the cabinet a few inches away from the server box (literally just an old PC fan). Super ghetto but actually pretty efficient at bringing the server's temperature down.
- smolder 7y ago
  There are pre-made circuits which come with a temperature sensor and can control fan speed to accomplish the same kind of thing. e.g. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B077SLWWXL/ https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B077SLWWXL/
mastax 7y ago
A few vendors make phase-change coolers which can activly cool below ambient. They're pretty expensive and niche and probably not reliable in the long term. Since it's going in the garage Id just get some really loud server fans.
mcv 7y ago
Water cool it, maybe? Moving that kind of heat out of a regular heatsink is going to be extremely noisy and you'll be blowing a lot of hot air through your machine. Personally I'm not that interested in extreme power at the cost of extreme heat. I'm more interested in enough power with as little heat as possible. I find it hard to figure out which processor is the best fit for that these days, but I guess this one isn't it.
CoolGuySteve 7y ago
The new 16 core Ryzen part already recommends a 280mm closed loop water cooler and so it doesn't come with a fan like the 12 core Ryzen does. Finding an AIO with a waterblock that will cover a Threadripper is very difficult though. It's one of the reasons why I'm sticking with an overclocked 12 core Ryzen.
- gameswithgo 7y ago
  there are dozens of threadripper coolers on the market, air and water
  - CoolGuySteve 7y ago
    For TR4 at least, they're advertised as being compatible with the mount but the actual waterblock doesn't cover the whole processor. AFAIK the Enermax TR4 is the only AIO that covers the TR4 but it has mold issues that cause it to degrade over a few months. It has 2 stars on Newegg right now.
    - bitL 7y ago
      I have TR4 II 360mm, so far good (~1 year). 1st version was killing x399 boards with leaking water though...
    - loeg 7y ago
      > For TR4 at least, they're advertised as being compatible with the mount but the actual waterblock doesn't cover the whole processor. For the first month or two after TR1 was released in 2017, it was true that the existing AIO blocks didn't cover the entire heat spreader, but they did cover all of the chiplets inside the heat spreader. sTR4-specific AIO blocks came out within a handful of months. This hasn't been a problem for over a year.
hrgiger 7y ago
What temps you are getting? Are you looking tdie? Did you update bios? I am having 40~ tdie on 1950x with noctua air. (Even I clocked, disabled dynticks, have lot of pcie device and using quad channel). i think noctua is still competitive with water cooling on TR. I would recommend renew thermal paste, have a room inside of case, check negative/positive pressure and go through again your bios settings i.e. prevent clocking on load
swebs 7y ago
Water cool it and pipe it to a large enough radiator outside your garage.
newnewpdro 7y ago
Bury a loop of copper pipe out behind the garage, 6+ feet underground. Circulate the water cooler through said pipe. TL;DR: a short "geothermal" ground loop.
3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago
Also, 280w comes out to be about $58 a month in electricity for Bay Area pricing (29c/kWh). Collocation will probably be cheaper for some folks.
- m0zg 7y ago
  That's only if you use all cores 24x7 and all ALUs within those cores (vectorized workloads), which is very unlikely unless you're doing straight up linear algebra on the CPU. In CA there's also the issue of not having electricity in the first place sometimes though. So power _consumption_ seems kind of secondary.
  - Dylan16807 7y ago
    > That's only if you use all cores 24x7 and all ALUs within those cores These chips don't run at a fixed frequency. They dynamically adjust based on thermal limits and power limits. You only have to burden most of the cores/ALUs to hit maximum power. Any load above that threshold uses the same amount of power, as frequencies nudge down to compensate.
    - simooooo 7y ago
      That doesn’t sound right
      - Dylan16807 7y ago
        Why doesn't it sound right? Just look at the chart in the article: https://images.anandtech.com/doci/15044/3970X%20Power%20Graph.png https://images.anandtech.com/doci/15044/3970X%20Power%20Grap... The power limit is configured in the BIOS, and can be disabled, but with these massive chips they default to throttling down and capping power consumption so that you aren't forced to go crazy with the cooling system (and motherboard and PSU capacity).
    - m0zg 7y ago
      According to the linked Anandtech article, the maximum TDP is reached at ~22 cores fully slammed, yes. But it doesn't drop off much after that. But that's splitting hairs.
TD-Linux 7y ago
I run a previous-generation 2990WX (320W TDP) and the largest Noctua air cooler is easily sufficient at a low fan speed. If it's in your garage and you don't care about fan speed, you should be able just to blast the fans faster and have a well-ventilated case before resorting to water cooling. The cores start to throttle at 70C, which is far hotter than even the hottest garage.
- dragontamer 7y ago
  > The cores start to throttle at 70C, which is far hotter than even the hottest garage. Thermal dissipation however is proportional to delta-T (change in temperature). A 25C ambient will provide delta-T of 45C, but a 35C ambient will provide a delta-T of 35C: so your 35C ambient garage will reduce performance by at least 22% compared to 25C. ---- Note that Intel chips can go all the way to 95C or 100C, making cooling a far easier problem. So you're already dealing with a lower Delta-T when you use these AMD chips that throttle at 70C. (To be fair: AMD and Intel's measurement systems are a bit different, so we can't compare them directly. But IIRC, most people have a slightly easier time cooling Intel chips).
  - rat9988 7y ago
    You dismiss in your calculation the radiative flux.
  - sliken 7y ago
    Intel tends to cheap out on the connection to the heatsink (see overclocker forums for the complaints). Which actually results in a hotter CPU to dissipate the same watts. AMD spent the extra few $ for a good thermal connection between the silicon and the heat spreader. The new threadripper and Epyc chips are also physically quite large. It's much easier to cool the head spreader with 8 hot spots spread across the chip than a single smaller hot spot. So generally it's easy to get 180 watts out of a threadripper/Epyc chips than the equivalent Intel. In fact some of the highest end chips are not considered feasible to cool on air. It's either water cooling of throttling, like in the new Intel based Frontera (don't confuse that with the AMD based Frontier cluster). Basically keeping a dual socket Xeon 8280 cool without throttling is not practical on air.
snuxoll 7y ago
You may not be able to AC your entire garage, but you could cool an entire rack with a rackmount AC unit (tripp-lite sells them). It costs more since you are constantly having to cool hot air as it comes in, so it's not an ideal solution from a performance or affordability perspective. You can buy ducts to push the heat out, but garages typically have poor insulation so ugh. I live in Idaho and keep my 24U rack in my office, total idle draw on it is now around 4A@110V and considering power tops out at $0.11/KWh during the summer there's no real reason to colo it somewhere else.
- velosol 7y ago
  If you want an all-in-one there are climate cabinets that keep separate cool air and hot air loops e.g. [1]. The downside is of course the price at >$5k for a 24U. [1]: https://www.blackbox.com/en-us/store/Detail.aspx/ClimateCab-NEMA-12-Networking-Cabinet-with-AC---31-5-D-24U-6000-BTU-M6-Rails-120V/CC24U6000M631 https://www.blackbox.com/en-us/store/Detail.aspx/ClimateCab-...
szatkus 7y ago
You can downclock and/or undervolt the CPU if you need these many threads, but could bite relatively small single core performance reduction.
ComputerGuru 7y ago
Look into and get a split-unit ac. You can run the pipes quite a long distance, more than the advertising material and stock images would have you think! If power is cheap, you’ll regret not doing ten years ago. Pioneer had the best bang-for-the-buck the last time I checked.

wil421 7y ago

I’ve seen people on YouTube build a wood box around a small rack, put a bathroom fan inside, and run a foil hose for a dryer to the outside. The racks I saw already had a glass door so it was easier to build the sides and foil tap the cracks.

mgalgs 7y ago

How about some good old fans? I had a little NAS box in my garage for a few years that ran pretty hot and I was afraid of straining the hard disks. I ended up just using lm_sensors on the server to monitor temperature, and when it got it hot, kick off an SSH command to a raspberry pi sitting nearby to tell it to turn on an exterior fan (gpio -> mosfet -> relay) I had mounted to the side of the cabinet a few inches away from the server box (literally just an old PC fan). Super ghetto but actually pretty efficient at bringing the server's temperature down.

smolder 7y ago
There are pre-made circuits which come with a temperature sensor and can control fan speed to accomplish the same kind of thing. e.g. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B077SLWWXL/ https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B077SLWWXL/

mastax 7y ago

A few vendors make phase-change coolers which can activly cool below ambient. They're pretty expensive and niche and probably not reliable in the long term. Since it's going in the garage Id just get some really loud server fans.

mcv 7y ago

Water cool it, maybe? Moving that kind of heat out of a regular heatsink is going to be extremely noisy and you'll be blowing a lot of hot air through your machine. Personally I'm not that interested in extreme power at the cost of extreme heat. I'm more interested in enough power with as little heat as possible. I find it hard to figure out which processor is the best fit for that these days, but I guess this one isn't it.

CoolGuySteve 7y ago

The new 16 core Ryzen part already recommends a 280mm closed loop water cooler and so it doesn't come with a fan like the 12 core Ryzen does. Finding an AIO with a waterblock that will cover a Threadripper is very difficult though. It's one of the reasons why I'm sticking with an overclocked 12 core Ryzen.

gameswithgo 7y ago
there are dozens of threadripper coolers on the market, air and water
- CoolGuySteve 7y ago
  For TR4 at least, they're advertised as being compatible with the mount but the actual waterblock doesn't cover the whole processor. AFAIK the Enermax TR4 is the only AIO that covers the TR4 but it has mold issues that cause it to degrade over a few months. It has 2 stars on Newegg right now.
  - bitL 7y ago
    I have TR4 II 360mm, so far good (~1 year). 1st version was killing x399 boards with leaking water though...
  - loeg 7y ago
    > For TR4 at least, they're advertised as being compatible with the mount but the actual waterblock doesn't cover the whole processor. For the first month or two after TR1 was released in 2017, it was true that the existing AIO blocks didn't cover the entire heat spreader, but they did cover all of the chiplets inside the heat spreader. sTR4-specific AIO blocks came out within a handful of months. This hasn't been a problem for over a year.

hrgiger 7y ago

What temps you are getting? Are you looking tdie? Did you update bios? I am having 40~ tdie on 1950x with noctua air. (Even I clocked, disabled dynticks, have lot of pcie device and using quad channel). i think noctua is still competitive with water cooling on TR. I would recommend renew thermal paste, have a room inside of case, check negative/positive pressure and go through again your bios settings i.e. prevent clocking on load

swebs 7y ago

Water cool it and pipe it to a large enough radiator outside your garage.

newnewpdro 7y ago

Bury a loop of copper pipe out behind the garage, 6+ feet underground. Circulate the water cooler through said pipe. TL;DR: a short "geothermal" ground loop.

3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago

Also, 280w comes out to be about $58 a month in electricity for Bay Area pricing (29c/kWh). Collocation will probably be cheaper for some folks.

m0zg 7y ago
That's only if you use all cores 24x7 and all ALUs within those cores (vectorized workloads), which is very unlikely unless you're doing straight up linear algebra on the CPU. In CA there's also the issue of not having electricity in the first place sometimes though. So power _consumption_ seems kind of secondary.
- Dylan16807 7y ago
  > That's only if you use all cores 24x7 and all ALUs within those cores These chips don't run at a fixed frequency. They dynamically adjust based on thermal limits and power limits. You only have to burden most of the cores/ALUs to hit maximum power. Any load above that threshold uses the same amount of power, as frequencies nudge down to compensate.
  - simooooo 7y ago
    That doesn’t sound right
    - Dylan16807 7y ago
      Why doesn't it sound right? Just look at the chart in the article: https://images.anandtech.com/doci/15044/3970X%20Power%20Graph.png https://images.anandtech.com/doci/15044/3970X%20Power%20Grap... The power limit is configured in the BIOS, and can be disabled, but with these massive chips they default to throttling down and capping power consumption so that you aren't forced to go crazy with the cooling system (and motherboard and PSU capacity).
  - m0zg 7y ago
    According to the linked Anandtech article, the maximum TDP is reached at ~22 cores fully slammed, yes. But it doesn't drop off much after that. But that's splitting hairs.

TD-Linux 7y ago

I run a previous-generation 2990WX (320W TDP) and the largest Noctua air cooler is easily sufficient at a low fan speed. If it's in your garage and you don't care about fan speed, you should be able just to blast the fans faster and have a well-ventilated case before resorting to water cooling. The cores start to throttle at 70C, which is far hotter than even the hottest garage.

dragontamer 7y ago
> The cores start to throttle at 70C, which is far hotter than even the hottest garage. Thermal dissipation however is proportional to delta-T (change in temperature). A 25C ambient will provide delta-T of 45C, but a 35C ambient will provide a delta-T of 35C: so your 35C ambient garage will reduce performance by at least 22% compared to 25C. ---- Note that Intel chips can go all the way to 95C or 100C, making cooling a far easier problem. So you're already dealing with a lower Delta-T when you use these AMD chips that throttle at 70C. (To be fair: AMD and Intel's measurement systems are a bit different, so we can't compare them directly. But IIRC, most people have a slightly easier time cooling Intel chips).
- rat9988 7y ago
  You dismiss in your calculation the radiative flux.
- sliken 7y ago
  Intel tends to cheap out on the connection to the heatsink (see overclocker forums for the complaints). Which actually results in a hotter CPU to dissipate the same watts. AMD spent the extra few $ for a good thermal connection between the silicon and the heat spreader. The new threadripper and Epyc chips are also physically quite large. It's much easier to cool the head spreader with 8 hot spots spread across the chip than a single smaller hot spot. So generally it's easy to get 180 watts out of a threadripper/Epyc chips than the equivalent Intel. In fact some of the highest end chips are not considered feasible to cool on air. It's either water cooling of throttling, like in the new Intel based Frontera (don't confuse that with the AMD based Frontier cluster). Basically keeping a dual socket Xeon 8280 cool without throttling is not practical on air.

snuxoll 7y ago

You may not be able to AC your entire garage, but you could cool an entire rack with a rackmount AC unit (tripp-lite sells them). It costs more since you are constantly having to cool hot air as it comes in, so it's not an ideal solution from a performance or affordability perspective. You can buy ducts to push the heat out, but garages typically have poor insulation so ugh. I live in Idaho and keep my 24U rack in my office, total idle draw on it is now around 4A@110V and considering power tops out at $0.11/KWh during the summer there's no real reason to colo it somewhere else.

velosol 7y ago
If you want an all-in-one there are climate cabinets that keep separate cool air and hot air loops e.g. [1]. The downside is of course the price at >$5k for a 24U. [1]: https://www.blackbox.com/en-us/store/Detail.aspx/ClimateCab-NEMA-12-Networking-Cabinet-with-AC---31-5-D-24U-6000-BTU-M6-Rails-120V/CC24U6000M631 https://www.blackbox.com/en-us/store/Detail.aspx/ClimateCab-...

szatkus 7y ago

You can downclock and/or undervolt the CPU if you need these many threads, but could bite relatively small single core performance reduction.

ComputerGuru 7y ago

Look into and get a split-unit ac. You can run the pipes quite a long distance, more than the advertising material and stock images would have you think! If power is cheap, you’ll regret not doing ten years ago. Pioneer had the best bang-for-the-buck the last time I checked.