Watercooling my Intel 550 dual 10GBE card

[jallenlabs]

Why not? It gets hot.

Freezemod gpu block from Amazon, trimmed to fit. Angled fittings. Taped off the area to protect other parts.
Ill test and report back on temps. Its in a system with a Intel 6700T, a 120mm rad and a 80mm rad. Its going to be my new network router. PFSense.

 

[Vincero]

Is there actually any die temperature reporting?

Only other way to be sure would be measuring temp on backside of card where the controller is...

Did you take before measurements? Only way to be sure that it is cooler / the block is making good enough contact to soak up the heat.

 

[Ruru]

Never thought that someone would watercool a network card even though I've seen practically everything on a PC watercooled.

 

[Solaris17]

Never thought that someone would watercool a network card even though I've seen practically everything on a PC watercooled.

Gbics and 10g+ cards get tremendously hot

 

[Ruru]

Gbics and 10g+ cards get tremendously hot

Yeah I know, no wonder that they have heatsinks and I've seen some cards even having active cooling, but watercooling?

 

[Solaris17]

Is there actually any die temperature reporting?

On higher end cards definitely. Though usually you have to use flint or whatever tooling your manu provides. My transceivers run anywhere from 63-75ish C. My x540s depending on chassis can climb close to 80c if your actually pushing BW.

 

[jallenlabs]

Yes, there are temp sensors that can be read by HardwareMonitor. I have two cards, Ill run tests passive with the stock heatsink, then with fan (how I typically run it) and then watercooled.

 

[DaemonForce]

Seriously? It's an Intel card. Not QLogic, Emulex or nVidia. We're not heatscumming today. HHHL cards sure are fun though.

On that note, here's my SolarFlare:

No problems before, no problems now. Probably the one real reason for doing it is evening out air ingest temps for my video card since fans are kinda iffy with the Red Devil and RIGHT on top of this thing when a Hellhound or other 3-slotter is in.

LFG.

 

[eidairaman1]

Some modems/routers could use a fan sink.

Never thought that someone would watercool a network card even though I've seen practically everything on a PC watercooled.

 

[Solaris17]

Seriously? It's an Intel card. Not QLogic, Emulex or nVidia. We're not heatscumming today. HHHL cards sure are fun though.
View attachment 357405

On that note, here's my SolarFlare:
View attachment 357406
View attachment 357407

No problems before, no problems now. Probably the one real reason for doing it is evening out air ingest temps for my video card since fans are kinda iffy with the Red Devil and RIGHT on top of this thing when a Hellhound or other 3-slotter is in.

LFG.

Nice collection!

 

[jallenlabs]

Okay, so I was wrong. HWmonitor only reads speeds. So I dug deeper. Apparently Intel devs never activated the temp sensor as it was inaccurate. I do have temp sensor fittings, no temp gun, but Ill run whatever tests I can.

 

[LabRat 891]

Okay, so I was wrong. HWmonitor only reads speeds. So I dug deeper. Apparently Intel devs never activated the temp sensor as it was inaccurate. I do have temp sensor fittings, no temp gun, but Ill run whatever tests I can.

IIRC, current/recent gen Intel CPUs are experiencing similar.
TBH, kinda curious what causes this.
(Note: I've had AMD CPUs with quite inaccurate sensors before, too)

 

[Vincero]

IIRC, current/recent gen Intel CPUs are experiencing similar.
TBH, kinda curious what causes this.
(Note: I've had AMD CPUs with quite inaccurate sensors before, too)

EDIT: If you think CPUs and NICs have inaccurate temperature readings, have a look at the data from some NVME drives...

There's no real perfectly defined accurate way of measuring die temperature as different people want different things.
The peak temperature would usually be referred to as the hot spot which is usually in the middle of the busiest (electrically speaking) part of the chip and this can be 10-20 degrees higher than other parts of the die - it may be solid material like metal and other crystaline structures but heat doesn't radiate instantly through the chip.
CPUs / GPUs for example usually don't use hot spot temperature measurements for the information shown to users - it would fluctuate massively and panic the uninformed.
Sometimes drift in the expected/measured temperatures are corrected with firmware updates for some devices, sometimes the manufacturer just drops the capability...

Some CPUs in the past have had some 'interesting' temperature readings from the CPU die... AMD Phenom X6 I had would show idle die temperatures sometimes lower than ambient room temperature...
But at least the temperature increase appeared to scale with other temperature readings from the motherboard sensor IC so I guess it was accurate enough and the firmware probably used some offset to report information somewhere.

 

[R-T-B]

x540s

I use these as well and yes they can.

 

[jallenlabs]

So here is the rig its in now. It was in my router, but Im having difficulty with it atm. This system is a 8600k @5.3ghz, 16gb 3200mhz DDR4, Optane 900p, Intel 550, 1200w Corsair PSU- 1x360mm rad and 1x 120mm rad atm. Benching PCMark 10 now. I really only use this PC for experiments and tests... and web browsing.


Benching update.
PCMark10 5142 with igpu and cpu at 5.3ghz
highest core temp was 82C, Optane highest temp 31C, network card ?C
Web Speedometer gave a score of 18.8 and Im running Passmark on the Cpu, single thread, memory and storage.