What i was wondering? Why do you need external 12v?

To power the external optical drives I have under the Canon printer . Inside the 1U case there's a 5V switching regulator

Ah okey Thats also a solution

Have you seen the AC Ryan Backy? Plus a long molex cable = win

I prefer some industrial-grade binding posts and this has an advantage: the internal 5V regulator makes it usable on any external switching 12V power supply, not PC related

I've just installed my two noctua's. One's the original NH-U12 + Xeon mounting kit (sent free of charge by noctua!!), the other's the current NH-U12DX-1366. They do differ slightly - the newer heatsink has all the copper parts nickel plated, and has slightly less deep fins.

I am using 2x Nexus PWM fans. Definitely quieter than the stock fans but I cannot say really how quiet they are as I need to tune down other chassis fans. At least it is comforting to see they actually measure their fans ina proessional setup, would be inclined to believe their claim of 15.5dBA.

I also noticed the heatsink seems ever so slightly loose and can understand why you added the washers. Will try this at a later date (when I can be bothered!)

Temps in idle are very similar to yours - around 40 degrees C according to core temp. Have not yet had the time to do any load testing as I am knackered and need some sleep.

All in all a marked improvement over the stock fans - now I have to get my chassis fans quiet

Some little updates
We'll see for graphics: if I have to, then I'll swap the silent Radeon HD4350 for a Nvidia Quadro FX580 (since the program I would want to use needs a FX560 or better... ) let's hope the fan is silent enough

And now the new L5640 Xeons are out... a little pricey but lower-power (60W TDP) and 6-core for making this a tiny little 24-CPU thing if only they ain't that pricey ($1000 each )

For now, testing some dual monitor setups with an Ergotron LX dual LCD arm and a recycled NEC 18.1"... shame it's from 2002 and backlight's worn out... was a beautiful monitor

Have performed color calibration for the SM245B main screen I just found out the NEC 1850E from 2002 used an IPS panel, that's why its viewing angle is so wide shame it has a contrast of only 350:1 and as said, backlight has reached the end.
But this won't bother me: I have just ordered a brand new Eizo S2243WH-BK monitor to use as secondary full-HD video preview screen , we'll see how hard it is to emulate an sRGB color space from this 22" 1920x1200 extended gamut screen

BTW I swapped the Radeon HD4350 for a Geforce GT220, which for now retains its noisy little fan. But video editing performances have changed from night to day now I can afford real-time 1080p editing and preview... It's sad but true that ATI video cards don't get together well with Premiere CS4...
Looking forward to buy a Quadro FX580 which is 9500GT-based, so it should be easily silenced with something like a Coolink GFXchillah heatsink

Some new pictures
Let's cut some L-shaped aluminum and make the security holder for the second CPU heatsink


An attempt at silencing the Geforce GT220 using one of the 60mm blowers... not as expected


Successful attempt at cooling the SAS controller card without the messy Verax fan in front of the slots, which makes it a pain to swap cards in the lower three slots (every time I have to remove the audio card). Cutting and filing I was able to fit the 60x60 blower in the space originally intended for the battery backup unit


Now the Verax sits in the middle of the northbridges, we'll see how does it perform having the automatic thermal sensor

All "new" fans perform wonderfully the SAS blower and the Verax between the chipsets too

And now, Asus ENGT220 1GB Silent DIY with a modified heatsink taken from an old 7600GS, now temperatures are alright

That many hard drives is a silencing sin!

Nice rig! Good low power numbers considering how much processing power it has. Thanks for all the great pics and information.

Planning on upgrading system memory to 16384 MB

Before the DIMM prices rise again...

16384MB OK



Added a USB 3.0 HDD docking station too.

Ridiculous for me. But you actually use the power too

Looks great.

I am seriously envious about this beautiful, beautiful piece of work. Seriously! Obviously, I'm not expecting a hefty piece of machinery to be dead quiet, but it doesn't look like it will overheat or overwork itself. I can say with all sincerity that this is a very, very solid machine. I just wish I were as good at building PC's as you are. . . that and I wish I could cough up the extra dough.

Testing a ducted symmetrical intake-exhaust PWM cooling system... have to try tweakin' it


But that's not the only one modification I made

Moved the Promise card to X16 slot 4 and swapped the blower for an undervolted Ebmpapst 412, now in the X8 (X4 link) slot... there's a brand spanking new OCZ RevoDriveX2 card, 100 GB, 32 flash modules, 4 Sandforce 1222 controllers, for a pleasing experience

How is the ducted approach working out? Seems like your forcing heat from CPU1 into the cooler for CPU2, which probably means CPU1 will always be running hot under load. Not sure its the best approach. Not sure it matters, either, since the Noctua heatsinks you are using are serious overkill for the Xeon e5520 processors. Just curious, mostly.

I'm trying different approaches. The one you see in the picture is the push-pull version: the intake fan (1) blows into CPU1 heatsink, then air passes into CPU0 heatsink and is extracted by fan 2 on the rear (i.e. Mac Pro), but this way I'd have to use some high-pressure fans, if not air tends to escape from the top fins and goes into the PSU which speeds up. Now I'm trying the normal approach as it was before (each fan blows into its heatsink) and the duct's from CPU0 to the exhaust (no fan), but I should try putting back a fan on the exhaust, we'll see... I don't have 3 identical fans (on forced air channeling all fans should be the same and spin at the same speed, to avoid over or underpressures), I could try with the two Enermax fans on the CPUs and a Scythe Slipstream PWM on the exhaust, all FAN connectors on the mobo are controlled in sync by the CPU temp. I found based on empyrical tests that the Noctuas U12P fans are the best ones when placed close to a grile or heatsink. But they're standard 3-pin fans, so I'd have to put back to work that little board I built some time ago to PWM-control two 3-pin fans
And I have only one Thermalright blue fan duct... but I'm planning on getting 2 more

The Thermalright blue duct doesn't even fit your heatsinks correctly. If you really want it ducted you'd do much better with carefully cut card stock and some duct tape. Wouldn't even be too hard to fit since the two CPUs seem to be lined up perfectly with each other.

No unfortunately on this board they ain't aligned: CPU0 has the DIMMs on top, while CPU1 has them on bottom, so there's a 1" misalignment. Before starting to build the card duct I wanted to check the potential with the blue duct since I had it layin' around recycled from my HR01
Just now trying with the same config as the picture above, with the difference that there's no white duct to the exhaust and in place of the "fake" fan now there's the Scythe SL1225L12L-P, which I was unable to find on the official website: there's a SL1225LM-P, max 1300 rpm, but mine is a max 1500 rpm (was taken from a Kama Angle heatsink)

I made some modifications, turned 180 degrees the CPU0 heatsink so they're more close to each other, added an exhaust duct made from a SilenX 38mm frame and a little "heat screen" to prevent some air from going up the PSU

Some little modifications are coming I'll try once more experimenting with the Noctua fans, since the NH-U12DX are some very very nice piece of coolers
Will try to put the Multilane connector directly in the case, to free up the 7th PCI-E slot

First, let's make some little circuits to turn any 3-pin fan into a PWM fan


They don't interfere with the airflow and are mounted to the fan frame via a M4 bolt


For now some DIY 4-pin cables, but the standard 4-pin connectors are on their way for some better look


Getting rid of the Verax 80 fans: they're silent as for air noise but the motors produce a high frequency hiss that can be bothersome, since I had a couple of Enermax UCEV8 laying around...


And finally the blue LEDs showing that the fans are powered on . Little shame the BIOS can't detect CPU fans speed below 600 RPM (it says 0 ALERT... ) and I'm missing a third Noctua 12P to put as exhaust (it's on its way too... ). The Scythe moves less air than the Noctuas at the same PWM ratio, so for now... PSU getting lil' too warm, next week I'll fix all these things, for now I'll speed up the PWM control from 30 to 45%


PS I have a couple of Thermalright blue ducts coming to experiment more with the ducted cooling approach

The new Asus U3S6 card... still haven't tested it for speed compared to a X1 USB3.0 card


Detaching the NH-U12DXes to test some recycled HR-01s


Repositioning some of the PSU cables for a better and more pleasant (aesthetically) fit


Meanwhile, the blue ducts arrived


Moving the CCFL switch and the 12V external posts


Tracing to make two more USB port holes


Not only that: removing the brackets from two miniSAS adapter cards.


What for? To test clearance on the 1st slot


Modifying and adding homemade brackets to accomodate a couple of external SFF8088 SAS-SATA ports




Finally everything I need is directly mounted on the case without occupying any slot


Replacing the foam on the bottom since it was old and all detached


Cable management and hiding


Testing some ducts


Making the new front panel (from a Silverstone USB 3.0 panel)


Making two 90 deg USB headers, to maintain USB internal connectivity even with SAS card on the last slot


More air testing...


Thermalright LGA1366 bolt-thru kits... less obtrusive than the new universal pressure vault retention kit (which I had to modify to fit on a Xeon platform...)


New Ebmpapst 612F2 modified from close to open frame, no more high frequency hiss


I was even able to fit the 24p cable around in a way that doesn't interfere with the 1st 5.25" bay


PCIE external line and fan controller in place


Exhaust in place


Have to make some better fan cables,


Tested the Noctuas NF-P12 against Enermax UCCL12 in the same cooling setup, a 6°C difference and almost double the speed, 800 the Noctuas vs Enermax at full speed (1200), NF-P12s make more wind noise but have better cooling efficiency in a ducted setup . Despite the little room under it, PSU fan stays at 840 RPM in idle.
Tested even a single exhaust fan setup, it worked (no overheat or TM2) but the PWM control system of this Tyan board, being designed for server usage, doesn't spin the fans faster until CPU temp reaches 75°C so enough to PSU fan to reach max speed (1350) which becomes a little noisy.
Now the system is also "Quadro Ready", meaning a Nvidia Quadro card (single PEG cable) can be mounted easily

Updated config on 1st post

A Nvidia Quadro 4000 card just arrived
Another test: I will try to adapt two Prolimatech Samuel17 ultra-low profile CPU coolers to the Xeon mounting system, if they fit on my S7025 mobo I will try to place them so the 120 fan cools the DIMMs too (maybe the S17 is a little small for a E5520 Xeon but I read they tried it on an i7 920 so...

Remove that restrictive grille and replace it with a standard wire grille?

Like this:


It's a <5 minute job, and will increase airflow

Edit: I see that I actually commented on this on the first page of the thread, its a bit o_O that you haven't done this very easy mod to remove airflow restriction.

Been experimenting with the Samuel17's, they're quite good coolers being that very tiny size they can manage even a 80W old-style Nehalem Xeon now I have to experiment with the fans: Enermax UCCL12 are useless in HSF since once placed near a grille they stop producing any kind of airflow (low pressure it seems...). Tried some Noctua NF-P12s and they're better as for cooling performance, not that better as for noise. I have some Scythe Slipstreams (finally! ) on the way, SY1225SL12LM-P (1300 PWM), we'll see... my only one SY1225SL12L-P (1000 PWM, Kama Angle stock fan) performs quite well.

Wiblaaaaaaa I must admit I didn't imagine how much could that CM stock grille be restrictive now if I find the S17 coolers to be "not my taste" I'll revert to the Thermalright original HR-01s with a big difference: having replaced the two 3-in-2 backplanes with a second 4-in-3 one, I have 3 5.25 free bays just in path of the LGA1366 sockets, so now... perfect ducted cooling system solution!

Oh, it is. Even my noctua S12 made an efficient exhaust fan after I swapped the grille, it didnt do much before. So it's definently worth a try.

I conducted some stress tests with the new ducted cooling solution: first, man it's DIY made and not that well but it's efficient a single exhaust Slipstream fan can handle two E5520 Xeons with their HR-01 towers: Linpacking for 30 mins makes the fan spin up to a mere 850 RPM and CPUs to just 70 degrees .
But this efficiency in CPU cooling has a big downside: non-existent cooling of other mobo components integrated TS of one of the DIMMs reads 82 °C and I think that's what makes the PSU fan spin immediately to max speed (a noisy 1400 RPM), since CPU0 DIMM modules are right under it.
So I think I'll have to revert, like it or not, to top-down cooling using the two Prolimatech Samuel17s I have: adapted to LGA1366 Xeon mount and to rubber fan grommets they do a wonderful job (being completely asymmetrical) in cooling the RAM modules (TS reading in one of my tests with a Noctua fan was 52 °C...) and with Scythe Slipstreams they should perform even better

In the meantime, experimenting with a ducted HDD fan to cool the NBs but the big Quadro 4000 card makes it hard to fit...

Since the RMA procedure for a faulty Vertex2E 60G drive won't be quick (at least 10 days), I decided to swap the Hitachi 7K500-320 drive from my HTPC and use it to host the VMware data. It is very good as for performance (better than the WD3200BEKT) and since I didn't see much performance improvement in loading a XP32 virtual machine from the Revodrive, I'll use all the 93 GB SSD space for Win7x64 (and for me, it's better to load XP from a traditional HDD... ).
Temporarily a recycled WD3200BEKT stands in, this Vertex2E will become HTPC system drive

BTW had the Samuel-17s and SY1225SL12LM-P fans all set up and ready to test

Side note: I still need to get a DP cable for my Eizo