My aged home file server, which for the last five years ran diligently with a dual Pentium II setup, finally died last week after a protracted hardware failure. Admittedly replacing it should have come before death but I was in the process of moving into a new house so it was pushed on the way side.
I am replacing it with something much more capable, but in keeping with the same mindset I had when I built the first server, I'm using generation-old hardware to save money--in this case the new server is going to be based around a pair of Opteron 252 CPUs.
The CPUs I acquired came with heatsinks attached--but no fan. The heatsinks themselves are rather massive and are obviously intended to be put into a rack chassis where the case itself is a wind tunnel that will keep the air flowing. However, my case is a tall tower and I'm wondering if I should hunt down active cooling solutions for these CPUs or if the large heatsinks with decent airflow in the case itself will be enough.
I ask partially because I DID order fans to install but gosh darn those photos were misleading and the fans are much larger than I thought--so large that it is impossible to install both of them due to how close the CPU sockets are to one another. I am still kicking myself for this.
This server will be used at home and will be idle the majority of the time. The most rigorous exercise it will probably get will be doing occasional builds as I use it to host files for software experiments and and it will also be dishing out media to various other computers in the house. Admittedly I will probably also use it to host a medium dedicated server for Team Fortress from time to time, but I plan on getting a new box to do just that and leave this one to holding files.
Thanks!
I am replacing it with something much more capable, but in keeping with the same mindset I had when I built the first server, I'm using generation-old hardware to save money--in this case the new server is going to be based around a pair of Opteron 252 CPUs.
The CPUs I acquired came with heatsinks attached--but no fan. The heatsinks themselves are rather massive and are obviously intended to be put into a rack chassis where the case itself is a wind tunnel that will keep the air flowing. However, my case is a tall tower and I'm wondering if I should hunt down active cooling solutions for these CPUs or if the large heatsinks with decent airflow in the case itself will be enough.
I ask partially because I DID order fans to install but gosh darn those photos were misleading and the fans are much larger than I thought--so large that it is impossible to install both of them due to how close the CPU sockets are to one another. I am still kicking myself for this.
This server will be used at home and will be idle the majority of the time. The most rigorous exercise it will probably get will be doing occasional builds as I use it to host files for software experiments and and it will also be dishing out media to various other computers in the house. Admittedly I will probably also use it to host a medium dedicated server for Team Fortress from time to time, but I plan on getting a new box to do just that and leave this one to holding files.
Thanks!
