Can I mount a typical consumer LGA 2011 cooler (i.e., Thermalright Archon SB-E, Noctua NH-D14 SE2011) in a Supermicro Xeon E5 board that has a "Square ILM" LGA 2011 mount? Has anyone done this?

I'm aware Supermicro does some odd things with the case mounting holes on their motherboards. I'm also aware that some of their motherboards have "Narrow ILM" LGA 2011 mounts but I'm not looking at any of those.

Here's a board I'm interested in:

Supermicro X9SRE-F
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6813182334
http://www.supermicro.com/products/moth ... 9sre-f.cfm

I've magnified the photos of the front and back of this board and the CPU mounting area looks just like the one you'd find on an Asus X79 board. I also see that the Noctua compatibility list for the NH-D14 SE2011 includes the Supermicro X9SRi-F, which is the same board as above minus the 3 PCI-X slots.

However, I've found a few reviews of Supermicro Xeon E5 "Square ILM" motherboards where the user says they had to buy the heatsink from Supermicro (like this one: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6816101683), which I'd like to avoid.

I've never done an LGA 2011 build before so I'd appreciate any guidance on this.

Evening,

Just to let you know, I built a workstation based on the X9DRi-LN4F a few weeks ago. It's got the square mounting brackets and it fits standard heat sinks (I used 2 Prolimatech Megahalems Rev C's).

The things which needed adjusting in general:

Most of the motherboards with square brackets are EE-ATX and not E-ATX, so they need an extra 40mm (approx.) above the motherboard in the case. This worked fine in my Lian-Li, but sorry, I didn't measure exactly how much clearance was needed. Also, I had to drill 5 new holes for the motherboard standoffs. Finally, the front panel cables are slightly different to normal, but you just need to move one of the power led cables which is simple with a screwdriver.

Best of luck!

Thanks for the info! This is great to hear! The motherboard I'm looking at appears to have the exact same set up as yours (except mine only has one socket) so I think I'm safe.

Just out of curiosity, which case, procs and CPU fan are you using in your setup?

Ah I see, yes, you shouldn't have the issue with the EE-ATX, so you're only left with perhaps the odd stand off and shifting one of the power led cables. Anyway, please see the attached (camera phone quality, but you get the general idea) photo. There's clearance under the heatsinks for RAM without tall heatspreaders.



The case is a Lian-Li PC-A76 (http://www.lian-li.com/v2/en/product/product06.php?pr_index=630&cl_index=1&sc_index=26&ss_index=66). I've changed all the stock fans, 2 Noctua NF-F12 PWM Fans for the heatsink, 3 140mm Be-Quiet fans for the hard drives, 1 Noctua NF-F12 for the rear case fan.

It's actually reasonably quiet considering the amount of storage and processors, but it wouldn't make this forum's usual high standards!

From a technical point of view, it's two E5-2620 6-core 12-thread CPUs, they spend their life at 100% running different workloads in linux virtual machines. Under load I get the following temperatures reported by lm_sensors (think speedfan for linux) with 17C room temp:

Core 0: +41C
Core 1: +34C
Core 2: +39C
Core 3: +39C
Core 4: +41C
Core 5: +37C
Core 6: +39C
Core 7: +42C
Core 8: +41C
Core 9: +45C
Core 10: +42C
Core 11: +38C

Noctua's are at 1200 rpm
BeQuiet's are at 1050 rpm

I was actually very surprised and happy by the load temperatures, but I've not had it running long enough to drop the fan speeds and keep an eye on things yet.

Neat! Great photo!

The case I'm likely going to use is the Lian Li PC-A71F, which is very similar to yours.

Your coolers are 158.7 mm, which isn't too tall. Did your case have more room in case you needed to go with taller tower-style coolers? The coolers I'm looking at range around 170-175 mm tall.

The load temps you're seeing are great. I'm not sure I'll be that fortunate as I'm looking at an E5-1650 (130W) proc, whereas yours are the lowest in the 95W TDP group. That said, I'll only have one so the case should be cooler than yours.

With regards to the clearance under the heatsinks for the RAM, is there enough room that you could add/remove DIMMs in the slots closest to the heatsinks?

Thank you *VERY* much for the info you provided and your photo!

stay away from Supermicro, their motherboard is 3 yr. parts, 1 yr. labor, whereas Asus for e.g., is 3 yr. parts & labor.

Sorry for the late reply, was rather busy yesterday.

Anyhow, I went for Supermicro because of a need for IPMI and all the remote management. I'm not sure Asus have that sort of thing on their boards, but it is true, Supermicro are the 'cheaper' of this sort of board, Tyan and IBM also do have the remote KVM features and so on.

Anyway, I took the side of the case to get a picture for you - I tried to hold up a striaght edge next to the closest CPU heatsink to give you some sort of idea (although again, phone camera!)...






PS, I believe you can fit the RAM after heatsink - as long as your careful about order! They might have to start off at a bit of an angle into the clip bits.

Thanks for the pics! Its hard to see from the photos (not your fault...that's a very tough angle to shoot photos at) but it looks like there's not a lot of room above the coolers. To play it safe, I'm seriously rethinking my original plan of using a 140mm-type cooler and switching to the coolers you're using or the Noctua NH-U12 SE2.

I'm using a pair of Xigmatek SD-1283 Dark Knight II heatsinks with my E5-2620's, and it meant a clearance had to be within 159mm. That was a very tough call to make, but worked well for my build, however to put it lightly, it's very cramped.

The NZXT Source 210 Elite that I'm using is 194mm wide, but has a significant portion behind the motherboard for hiding cables. The heatsinks just barely miss the side panel when closed.



That's an example of the clearance as best I could get it when I did the build. For the record, when I put the side panel on for the first time, it did rub some nickel plating off a single heatpipe on one of the Dark Knights, but since then, there has been no contact at all.

I would suggest picking your heatsinks first, and then finding a case that is at the absolute minimum 25mm more than the height of the cooler. This will ensure you have adequate room. It was hard enough for me to find heatsinks that fit properly so closely together with the sockets, much less fit in the case I picked.

It looks like wharrad has an extremely tight situation, just like in my case (literally).

how's the above photo been taken?

When I was building my machine, I had put the coolers in for a dry fit test, and I used my phone for the photo. The phone was inside where the PSU currently is, because I didn't have any other components inside the case when I did this test. Since the case is white and my shop is very bright, the photo came out pretty acceptable.