Heatsink engineering is underrated. They're interesting objects.
Definitely! I was introduced to well-engineered heat sinks in 2008 when I built my first real server. Well, real for me, anyways. Prior to that all of my servers were stock Macs (G3/G4/G5). Actually, the first server at work was a IIsi.
I needed a solution for cooling that didn’t involve any fans because the server was in a very dusty environment and I didn’t want fan failure to take down the server.
The local computer store discussed it at length amongst themselves and recommended the Scyth Ninja and that’s what I used on a set of Pentium servers I built and deployed in 2008.
In 2012 I built a bunch of Xeon servers to replace them, and the Ninja wasn’t available any longer. Speaking with the salesman at a different company, he recommended the Noctua D14. Presently I have 3 Xeon servers deployed using that setup. Built in 2012, running 24/7, no fans on the CPU (there are case fans though), without any issues.
This one pictured is one replacement for one of those, which I’ve been working on for…. 6 years. Things keep coming up at work that prevent me from working on the project and I don’t get much time for it. Fortunately the 2012 Xeon servers still work just great, but we all know time is against them.
This one pictured will be a 22 core v4 Xeon, with 256GB DDR4 RAM, and 5x Intel Optane 900p 280GB NVMe PCIe drives(all in RAID 1 for redundancy). I chose this Noctua P1 heat sink because it was designed by Noctua to be passive from the ground up, which is important to me.
I’ve benchmarked the 5 Optane drives to 10GB/sec read and write. These Optane drives have crazy high IOPS, perfect for a high transaction server.
I realize this is a Mac friendly site, but some workloads just work better on x86 Linux.