eepete, how much noise do your SCE300-housed computers make?
I've eyeballed similar combos for a while but I've been wary of how loud those small fans would turn out.
There are two fan speeds available. The FAN-0065L4 is the "loud" one, but it really moves the air. The FAN-0100L4 is the "Not so Loud" (not to be confused with "quiet") one. The fans in the picture are a loud one and 2 not so loud ones, but, I need this to work at 120° ambient. For normal room temps, a single "not so loud" in that position where you see the FAN-0065L4 (the loud one) would work OK. The CPU doesn't really get warm running BSD doing "normal things". I suspect if you were transcoding video or some other operation that runs all the cores at once it would need the "loud" fan or two "not so loud" fans. These fans are $15 each, so the price of making a change is not too bad. You can remove the fan holder and change fans without taking the motherboard out.
On my big 1 RU severs (max CPU power 160 W), the fans are both _really_ loud and dual (in case one fails). None of the 40 mm fans for this chassis are anywhere close to that loud.
FWIW, I put a smaller 40mm fan in just for fun. IDK the CFM, but the fan was .11 amps at 12V. It's pretty quiet. I think that would be fine for room temp use also, but you have to make your own fan connector.
Possible plan of action depending on your hardware skill: Try a single 40mm fan that is just on all the time by putting the right 4-pin connector on the two wires. Put it in as the fan closest to the front panel. If things are too hot, order the Not so Loud fan. Just the max dissipation of the M2 (8W, but typical much lower) and the memory (3-4W each stick) and the CPU max dissipation makes it hard to run this as a "fan-less" system. FWIW, the large amount of memory is just to take full advantage of how well ZFS caches files, and let me have a /tmp that's a RAM disk.
One other piece of data on this motherboard/chassis. Enclosed is a thermal image of the FLEX version of this same motherboard The motherboard I'm using the mini-ATX form factor, the chassis is a FLEX form factor, that's where the extra room for the small format PCIe (or my power supply)comes from. This was the 1st motherboard I evaluated. The image is a bit misleading, as the coloring has the range adjust based on the relative temperature. The lower left is the M2 card. The actual temperature of the card was about 90° F (ambient was about 73° F). The back DRAM row runs a bit hot here, about 96°. All still OK for normal indoor use. Note in the picture how cool the CPU is, the heat sink on that is really good. The system had FreeBSD running, nothing special going on, the +12 was at 1.8 amps.
If you look closely at the picture of the ATX-mini motherboard (the one with my supply on it), on the lower right just behind the front panel and under the 16 wire ribbon cable, you'll see a small fan. It's a 30mm size and is always on. It cools that back memory stick, and the power supplies between the ATX power and the memory stick. I added that because of my high operating temperature constraint.
Note also that I made my own 16 pin connector to the front panel, in the thermal image you can see the very long cable SuperMicro supplies. In the lower right of my power supply you can see a 2 pin connector with wires 1 (red) and 2 of the front pannel. This is how the power supply can boot the machine and take it down.
Lots of info, hope it makes sense.
- pete
www.hardwareluxx.de
