Dedicated Servers for Web Hosting and Number Crunching.
Building The First of My Liquid Cooled Dedicated Servers
Dedicated servers are usually quite expensive so I am attempting to do this on the cheap, buying some used and some new equipment, adding water cooling to make these dedicated servers as quiet as a silent home pc. So far the experiment is looking good, as I write this on my liquid cooled Intel Q6600 Quad core overclocked to 2.9 GHz I have the first of my liquid cooled dedicated servers running right next to it and it is running quieter than my Q6600.
With more improvements scheduled for my prototype for the dedicated servers things are looking good, but before I go on I need to show you what has been done so far.
Converting computer cases for the dedicated servers
First off I am using a Supermicro X7DA8 Motherboard designed for dedicated servers and the moment it arrived I fell in love with it. It is very well laid out and best of all supports a long list of tested FB DIMM memory. But the good news doesn't stop their, I had a question regarding the server motherboard so I called Supermicro's tech department and the guys there were easy going down to earth that really new their stuff and were friendly and nice to speak with. Wow what awesome customer service.
The pictures below are of my parts for the dedicated servers.
Pictures of the Parts for the first of my three Dedicated Servers
A pair of Xeon E5320 1.86 GHz Quad cores under the CPU Water blocks. In the picture you can see the bright color of the coolant, which gets a boost from a UV LED. Right now my water to coolant ration is between 50 to 65 percent coolant, not sure how that will affect my temps, but it does look cool and gives the dedicated servers an air of mystery. I will try and get some information on the heat dissipation and absorption of coolant compared to water.
Here is the ATX Case so to answer the question: Can a ATX case hold a EATX motherboard? Yes it an with some modification. Be sure to see the case modification pictures that show the work in more detail.
This is one of the dedicated servers with the server motherboard, 667 FB-DIMM memory, Xeon Quad Core CPUs and everything but the coolant pump installed for the first test... It Works!!! This is the first of my devoted servers for protein folding research.
