NAS Build 2019 Step 6 - CPU Installation

The Xeon CPUs arrived and I now have enough components to build the base system without the storage drives (remember I still have SSD drives for booting the core OS).

If this is your first time seeing this series, I recommend starting at the beginning.

Building A New Nas

You can find all the other posts below, this is the 7th post in the series.

Installing CPUs

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Because these are very large CPU's physically, they use a double lever system. If you look closely you can see the two bars used to lock the plate down.

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CPUs are installed and seated properly.

Ram Installation

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I got eight 8GB DDR3 1600MHz ECC Reg ram for a total of 64GB. To think Bill Gates said no one would ever need more than 640KB of ram!

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Ram installation is a snap, literally.

CPU Cooler Installation

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These are some big CPU coolers and installation is a little time consuming but not too difficult.

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First one is installed, as you can see there is a pretty significant gap between the bottom of the cooler bracket and the socket bracket. This is normal and is just a visual abnormality.

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Good to go! This didn't take too long, maybe 15-20 minutes total. The cool is fairly generic and fits a lot of different CPUs so you need to make sure you have the correct screw set. It comes with 3 sets of screws and the mounting bracket has 3 slots where you can attach the screws.

Mounting the motherboard

Now we are starting to build a server. Before I can mount the motherboard, I need to identify which standoffs are correctly installed and which need to be moved. In my case I had to move three mounts.

Having a good toolset is very handy. I love this kit and was super cheap and was presently surprised at the quality. I highly recommend having one of these kits.

I do wish I had one of these, and probably should have ordered it before building this. It would come in handy when doing Raspberry Pi projects as well. For now, I just used zip lock bags so I don't lose any screws.

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Installation went really well. I do not like not having an IO plate in the back but other than that it fits perfectly and was painless. I should have tested before installing in the case but I tend to just install and go from there.

At this point, I can get the operating system installed and do some testing. I am still waiting for the data hard drives at this point (which at the time of writing this have actually arrived).

CPU Temperatures

Although I am skipping ahead a bit here (system is installed and being tested without data drives) I want to share CPU temps as it is relevant to the CPU cooler installs and thermal compound application.

Ideal temperatures on a Xeon 2690 v1 is around 35C idle and around 65C under a full load.

Idle

100% load

I am quite happy with those temperatures, I was hoping for good results as I used a rather expensive thermal compound solution. Although one CPU is obviously having more temperature issues than the other. Although they are still well within range, I might go ahead and inspect it and see if I can make some improvements.

If you want to
While I have a working machine, I still have a lot of steps to go (some of them I already did but I want to take this in order).

NAS 2019 Build Series

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