Adequate fan flow cooling for Tesla cards

S

Slade

2[H]4U
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Jun 9, 2004
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I have 2 tesla cards and am thinking of the cooling requirements. They are passively cooled so thinking of the case air flow design and fan CFM's that anyone has used in their build while housing these beasts.

They will potentially be training for weeks on end at 100% gpu usage/100% memory so getting ideas now on the case build before I order the parts. I've read what the NVidia PDF states on it so I have a generic idea. I will be putting together my list in the coming weeks before I have to present this to my boss.

Any thoughts/experience would be valuable.
 
important question, are you planing to use a standard case or a rackmount case?. what kind of environment are the case gona be faced? ..
 
I'm going with a standard case at this point as this is more dev type equipment instead of prod. If need be, I can stick it in our air conditioned server room, but before resorting to that I will be working in a standard ~72F environment to do some initial testing. I'm working on developing machine learning hence why the full power usage. According to the PDF, it needs around minimum 12 CFM at 30C inlet temperature. I won't be running more than 1 hdd and ssd/m.2 in the system. In a full tower with 2x 140mm inlet fans (example 750D airflow), there is potentially ~60 CFM per inlet fan but since there is space from the fans to the GPU's, I'm thinking that the actual amount of flow is cross sectional meaning maybe ~1/4 the actual fan flow is being directed into the GPU at best. I'm imagining I'd have to fabricate some ducting to ensure flow into the Tesla cards.
 
Oh well that's an easy solution if you are going with an standard case, I would look for a case with direct GPU fan orientation in the HDD bays, couple of examples i've used with great results are Corsair C70 or the Corsair 500R. both great options for GPU cooling as the source of the flow i'ts very close to the GPUS, another option is to go with a case Strictly made for Airflow Like the Corsair AIR 540 or AIR 740 that kind of dual chamber case is great as it have PSU, HDD, SSD in a secondary chamber, so all the airflow directly go to crucial components.
 
I will be testing 1 card in a 750D airflow edition to see how it works in that environment. If the onboard temp sensors indicate no throttling, I may go with a full tower case rather than mid-tower to take advantage of larger fans. I also like that the hard drive cages are configurable which may open up the idea of going to a larger full tower with the HD cages isolated in another section. It's a bit odd playing with a discrete card worth more than the rest of the system combined.
 
well, yes that may bring you a good idea. that's why the Air 740 it's one of my main recommendations for GPU cooling, as the ir go unrestricted and no one have to worry about HDD cage layout as they are in a secondary chamber. Fantastic case in my opinion I use several Air 540 for work with great success on passive cards.
 
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