AMD Athlon MP 2200+ Server Roundup - September 2002

Cooling Performance Comparison

Tyan offers a System Monitor utility for use with their Tiger and Thunder series of motherboards that allows you to monitor temperatures at six particular places on the motherboard itself.

Both CPUs are monitored, the area around the memory banks, the AGP slot and the area around the voltage regulators are also monitored for their temperature. Because Monarch's solution used a Tiger MPX instead of the Thunder K7X we could not compare its temperatures to the rest of the solutions, so this comparison will serve more as a battle between the 1U and 2U offerings.

These are the locations (labeled in red) that we measured the temperature of.

We ran two sets of temperature tests, one with the system at idle and another after the system had been running CPU/memory intensive tasks (Prime95) for 45 minutes. The reason we focused on CPU/memory intensive tests to drive the heat up is to keep from dealing with the variable of hard drive heat since each of the servers used different drives.

The most important areas to look at here are the CPU temperatures and the DIMM/VRM temps as well. In terms of CPU cooling both Appro and CCSI seem to have the best overall setup, although it is obvious that the second CPU doesn't get cooled as well as the first in a lot of the setups (e.g. Appro/Elite PC). Appro offered by far the best overall cooling although the second VRM was somewhat neglected in their cooling solution.

Racksaver provides the perfect example of why the blowers that Appro and CCSI used are much better than conventional fans as their 1U solution reached the highest CPU temperatures we recorded during the idle tests alone.

Under load the situation doesn't change too much; Appro continues to lead in a number of cooling categories, but for the most part the leaders and worst performing solutions don't change.