Stephen’s World

OMG The Noise

So we have a new box at work for the lab, it is a Sun SunFire X2100 machine, quite sweet box, Dual Core 175 Opteron, 4Gb of RAM and dual 250Gb disks all in a 1U rack box. There is one problem with it, turn the thing on and the noise is deafening, the 8 internal fans make the thing sound like a Jumbo Jet taking off at Heathrow.

Had a check in the bios and into the PC Health check options where usually the settings for the fans and the like are, think okay lets tweak the PWM settings to drop the fan speed down a bit.

What was startling was that all the fans where running at 19k RPM, tho two would drop to a mere 2.7k RPM. So when it comes to tweaking the fan settings we find that the option that sets the temp threshold has a max temp setting 4 degrees under the idea temp of the CPU, way to make sure the fans always run flat out.

So that aside, the noise from this thing actually drowns the noise of the buses on Oxford Street, when we put it in our server room I suspect it will actually be so noisy that we can here out side of the room…