Cooler Gotchas

We’ve been building lots of machines lately and it seems like we have struck out twice. Both times with cooler issues and once with a lack of an SSD:

  • We got the nice case and it says there is 65mm of clearance, the problem is the (??!!) people who designed it put the Ac power right next to the cooler, so with a big cooler like the Shrunken B is too wide for it. We could mod the case and move it, but probably better to get a less efficient but 34mm tall cooler like the Noctua instead. So be warned this case is nice, but with the AC where it is the clearance is 65mm over the top but won’t work for a 120mm fan on top. So instead we got the Noctua NH-L12 which is less efficient but shorter

  • We also got a file server case and Supermicro motherboard. The problem is that it uses the relatively unusual narrow ILM. The normal cooler uses a square interlocking module, but because this has 8 DRAM slots and 7 PCI Express, it uses the narrow ILM. So the Prolimatech Genesis won’t fit. But the good news is Noctua which I’ve used for small builds and for big does have a version the NH-U12DX i4 and NH-U9DX i4 and the NH-U12 is well rated by silentpcreview.com so a good choice at about $65 at Amazon.com

One response to “Cooler Gotchas”

  1. […] find highly effective coolers like the Noctua NH-14. The main issue is that server boards use the narrow ILM rather than the traditional square ILM and there are very few available. The best one seems to be […]

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