A previous post discussed using an Intel D945GCLF2 Atom-based mainboard for a little mini server setup. It’s been working great, except for that damn fan for the memory controller. It was pretty noisy at first, but quickly degraded into a crunching worthless disaster.

The product review comments at newegg described this exact behavior so I wasn’t too surprised. My friend Matt replaced his with a $3 fan immediately and has been happy with it since.

I opted for a slightly more expensive fan that is supposed to run at less than 14 dBA - a Silenx Ixtrema Pro Series. It’s still a 40mm fan with the same depth but I can’t hear it run at all. Product reviews imply this fan won’t stay quiet after about 6 months, so we’ll see if that happens. Ideally I’d just replace the crappy heatsink with a larger one and maybe a heat pipe to the case.

Now the only noise in the system is the WD Raptor drive. I’ve noticed the drive runs at between 50 and 55 degrees C since the case is not actively cool, so that is on the hot side (WD’s MTBF testing was done at 50 degrees). It is way overkill for this box, so I may replace it with a WD Green Power drive, or just give up and do a small SSD.

But hey, I’ve got over a month of cool looking graphs out of Zenoss now, such as my router network traffic:

[caption id=”attachment_215” align=”aligncenter” width=”645” caption=”Zenoss Network Performance Graph”] Zenoss Network Performance Graph[/caption]