My new 3U CPU heatsink arrived today. This is the big one with a fan. I ordered it the early August, the Raptor needed its usual two week to process the order (well, they still are a tiny company so they are not as fast as big ones), the USPS was fast this time but our Post Service was even slower than usually.
Anyway, the thing arrived. So I removed the older 2U heatsink and installed this new one. Of course I didn’t re-seated the PCU so the system refused to start. So I re-seated all things once more (including the RAM as it is placed close to the CPU socket) and it started to work!
Well, temperatures. My previous situation was 61-63oC in idle or light use (with CPU governor “powersave”) and up to 85-87oC in full use (with “ondemand”).
Now I have 51-52oC in normal use (with teh “ondemand” governor). By “normal use” I mean also running of a current, un-optimised Firefox with Javascript-burden WWW pages. I saw temperatures over 70oC in full use.
For your information, current temperatures (when I’m writing this post) are (as obtained from “sensors” command):
Chip 0 Core 0: +52.0°C (lowest = +25.0°C, highest = +67.0°C)
Chip 0 Core 4: +52.0°C (lowest = +26.0°C, highest = +68.0°C)
Chip 0 Core 8: +51.0°C (lowest = +25.0°C, highest = +66.0°C)
Chip 0 Core 12: +51.0°C (lowest = +27.0°C, highest = +69.0°C)
Chip 0 DIMM 12 : +52.0°C (lowest = +29.0°C, highest = +54.0°C)
Chip 0 Nest: +51.0°C (lowest = +27.0°C, highest = +60.0°C)
Chip 0 VRM VDD: +55.0°C (lowest = +31.0°C, highest = +61.0°C)
Please don’t ask me why the only RAM module is called "DIMM 12". I don’t know.
But the noise is different. The new CPU fan is very powerfull and noisy – it runs at full speed during start and increase of noise is noticeable (it’s much louder) than it was just with three case fans. But after that the system is quiet. Fans are running on slow speeds and they are even not noticeable. At least I cannot hear them. Previously the fans ran on pretty high speed so the system was near as noisy as my SGI O2 is (an its 10-years old and dirty fan is not really not quiet!). Now it is the quietest system in house. Even our GPD Pocket laptops are much more noisy (not speakting about the ORDOID or about the iMac G5).
So this piece of cra.., err, aluminium with the attached fan might be expensive but it worth its price!
Resume: If you are going to buy the Raptor Blackbird then you should buy the 3U heatsink and not the cheaper 2U one!