How do you cool an nVidia Tesla GPU?

when my desk is this messy to start a video you know it's gonna be fun [Music] nothing is more detrimental to my day than running out of coffee which is why i'm thrilled to tell you about today's video sponsor trade coffee i no longer have to choose from the grocery store's limited selection of coffee between the cereal and oatmeal i get the coffee i like shipped right to my door on a schedule that works for me whether you're new to coffee or a seasoned nerd trade makes it simple to find the right coffee to get your day started right their simple 7-step quiz will match you to the right roast and style based on how you brew and what you like as much as i enjoy spending 10 minutes mixing up a cocktail i want my coffee ready on demand using a refillable pot is usually my go-to solution and luckily there's no judgment from trade with this or any other brewing method an ounce of cream roast on par with an imperial stout whole bean hold the decaf and boom the coffee i like just the way i like it trade also has a first match guarantee meaning if you don't like the coffee you receive they'll replace it for you on the house for a limited time craft computing viewers who set up a new account at drinktrade.com will receive their first bag of coffee for free plus free shipping that's drinktrade.com or follow the link down in the video description cheers guys welcome back to craft computing everyone as always i'm jeff in my last video i took a look at this the nvidia tesla m40 and recommended this for a mid-range graphics card option if you're looking to build a gaming pc or simply upgrade an existing one now this is a retired enterprise graphics card that shares the exact same gpu core as the gtx titan x maxwell although this one has 24 gigabytes of gddr5 on board now there are a couple inherent problems using a tesla graphics card in a gaming pc number one there are no graphical outputs on these cards meaning that you need to get video out from your pc in some other way second is the passive cooling solution used on tesla gpus now these cards are not passive because they are just so much better at dissipating heat than their gaming counterparts rather they rely on server airflow to keep them cool what's more most of the servers that i have out in my garage don't even have enough static pressure to push air all the way through these giant heat sinks meaning that even out there these are going to require some form of active cooling if you bought one of these to put into a standard pc tower that is even more true so today i'm going to look at some different cooling solutions for the tesla-based graphics cards now this includes everything from the tesla k80 that i looked at a couple weeks ago to the m40 and m60 as well as some of the pascal-based gpus like the p40 and p100 now the most obvious way to cool one of these cards down is to strap a giant blower to the back of it and just force air through it and luckily last week that's exactly what i did with this 3d printed shroud assembling it is pretty darn simple the blower goes into the back and then the shroud itself screws into the back of the tesla m40 now all delta blowers like this do a fantastic job at keeping the tesla cards cool in fact my tesla m40 never even reached 60 degrees celsius under full synthetic load they come with the expensive noise these fans run at about 3 600 rpm and well listen for yourself prepare for takeoff the other problem with these fans is it's really difficult to adjust them with the fan headers on your motherboard because a standard fan runs at 12 volts and at 12 volts this runs at 3600 rpm and consumes 2.92 amps dropping this fan from 12 down to 9 volts will often cause this fan to stop spinning altogether because your motherboard just cannot provide enough current so instead of just being quieter you wind up with no airflow at all so on the table in front of me i have a variety of other fans as well as some fan controllers to try out on the tesla m40 to see if we can get this running cool as well as quiet starting with this 3d printed adapter that allows me to screw in a standard 40 millimeter case fan and of course we're going to start out with everyone's favorite in the knock to a 40 by 20 millimeter fan and if that isn't able to move enough air and i suspect it might not be we'll move on to a set of server delta blowers and if you happen to hear some 3d printing sounds in the background that's because i'm printing a third fan shroud which will let me plug in a standard 80 millimeter case fan but like i mentioned let's go ahead and start out with the delta 75 millimeter blower and see what our control temperature is like i'm sure one of the questions i'm going to get right away for the delta blower is why don't i just use one of the noctua load noise adapters which essentially turns the 12 volt signal into a 7 volt signal well unless i wanted this to start on fire i think that would be a really bad idea see again it comes down to the amount of current lower voltage equals higher current and this draws all the current that it can handle which is a lot more than the low noise adapter can handle so to start out with we're just going to run the delta blower at full speed and see the results that we get now i do have a couple methods to possibly slow this down and we'll give those a whirl once we have our control numbers so let's go ahead and get the blower adapter onto the back of the tesla m40 and it installs with the same screw holes as the long pci brackets do on the card and they're just a couple of m3 bolts of course like all things in life getting the angle right is paramount all right that goes on there the blower is just a press fit into the back of the card and we're ready to rock and now for my least favorite part about running these cards there it goes so as you might be able to hear this is actually issue number one with trying to slow down the fan is there's not enough current to keep it running and so i'm pretty sure it keeps tripping the over current protection on one of the fan headers and then shutting itself off but then speeding back up as the voltage comes back that's really annoying all right so as you can tell i swapped it into another fan header and now it's running at a full 12 volts uh yeah this is why these fans suck or blow as it were and this is exactly why we're here trying to quiet this fan down but still get decent temperatures out of our tesla m40 let's get this test over quickly all right according to hardware info our gpu is idling at 28.5 degrees celsius which is essentially the ambient temperature inside this room right now that should tell you how much air is going through this gpu to reach our max temperature we're just going to run heaven benchmark at ultra quality and extreme tessellation to stress the gpu to its absolute limit we're also overclocking with msi afterburner as you can see i have our core clock slid all the way to the right as well as our memory clock up about 450 megahertz this should get us our max overclock without modifying the bios all right into the benchmark and we are running at a clock speed of 1225 megahertz and a memory speed of 1722 and up at the very top you can see that we jumped pretty quickly from ambient temp all the way up to 51 or 52 degrees celsius we'll see how long this actually takes to level out and we have completely stabilized at about 54 and a half degrees so like i said this blower has no problem at all keeping the tesla m40 nice and cool however i'm already half deaf in one ear so let's go ahead and stop this test i'll wait the requisite six or so seconds for the gpu temperature to come back down to idle and i can unplug that fan nothing but 3d printer sounds i like it let me go ahead and introduce you to secret weapon number one now obviously there's not enough current on the motherboard to support running this fan at 6 volts so i can use something like a dc speed controller with a 12 volt 3 amp power supply hooked up to it to be able to run this at a lower voltage with a much higher current now this will still max out at 12 volts so we can't run the fan any faster but it should let us run it slower so let's go ahead and give that a shot now and the fan has no problem at all sitting at literally the lowest setting possible it is blowing air and i can definitely hear it but it is far quieter than it was before in fact i have video cards and systems now they get louder than this and a quick check on the old multimeter shows that we are running at just 2 volts 1.92 volts i like this thing yeah anything above 2 volts and this gets very loud very quickly uh that's only 2.8 volts to tell you what kind of current this requires to keep it spinning so that's 2.1 volts right there and honestly that's about as loud as i want this card to be so i think i'm going to go ahead and benchmark it there and we'll see if the card is able to stay cool with the fan running at this speed so we're climbing a little faster than before and that's kind of to be expected we're already up to about 48 degrees celsius so there's 57 so we've matched the previous high temperature and we are still climbing although we're not climbing all that quickly power wise we are sitting right around 200 watts which is about what i would expect out of this particular card however temperature wise we're still sitting right around 68 degrees celsius and in fact we seem to be kind of leveling off um i don't know that we're going to get very much higher and i certainly don't think we're going to hit 80 degrees all right so i was wrong about staying under 80 degrees celsius in fact we just peaked at 81.2 a moment ago uh yeah this is about as fast as i want to run this fan because anything more than 2.1 volts gets very loud very quickly that right there is 2.4 volts and that's the difference between running at 81 approaching 82 degrees and 75 and dropping so this is too loud in my opinion for a graphics card to run in 2021. it may have been okay back in 2008 with my 9800 gtx plus cards but it ain't okay today now to cool this card back off that's what 11.8 volt sounds like we're dropping like half a degree per second sixty four two sixty three six sixty three two sixty two seven yeah about point five degrees per second so blower card it's great if the system lives somewhere else but it's not great if you have to sit in the same room as it all right out with the blower fan and in with the 40 millimeter case fan we're gonna see how well this one works on this 215 watt beast of a card the shroud installs the exact same way with a couple of m3 bolts now we're going to start with the classic noctua nf a4 a 40 by 20 millimeter case fan now i have made installation of this fan a little bit easier on the shroud by sinking in some threaded inserts with a soldering iron so all we have to do is screw directly into the shroud and it should look a little something like that in what is definitely the most awkward shroud of the day let's give it a test early impressions the fan is spinning but it's not spinning very fast uh if i had to call it anything i'd say it's probably under a thousand rpm this fan should be capable of up to 5000 rpm at a full 12 volts and if early impressions are anything to go by this is not going to end well at least at stock fan settings uh we're idling at 45 degrees celsius which is a full 17 degrees higher than we were with the delta blower fan actually the noctua is running about 1200 rpm i guess it's within spitting distance of what i guessed but i guess we'll see how long that 45 degree temperature lasts well we're about 20 seconds in and we're already at 63 degrees celsius although it's not climbing quite as quickly as i would have imagined and about two minutes into the test and i think that's all she wrote 89 degrees celsius and we are thermal throttled to hell and back going down as far as about 300 megahertz uh yeah i think we're gonna need to speed this fan up now normally i'd reboot the pc and go into the bios and i'd play with the fan settings inside of there but i want to do this a little bit faster than normal so enter secret weapon number two this is a fun little adapter that i put together uh actually bit wit kyle did a video on this exact board gosh i want to say like two years ago and i've been using these ever since this is a usb step up adapter what this does is it takes a usb micro input and there's this little knob on the side that allows you to vary the voltage anywhere from three volts all the way up to 24 volts as long as it's not a real high current so whereas the dc speed controller if you put 12 volts into it you'll get 12 volts as a max out with this you can put 5 volts in and get up to 24 volts out and of course i had to 3d print a nice little enclosure for it and solder in a fan header so let's plug it in all right to start with let's go ahead and make sure this thing is outputting 12 volts we're at 10 500 right now let's give it just a little bit more there is 12.1 volts so we'll give that a whirl that's about what the pc should be outputting and that'll run that fan at max speed i'd say it's running faster i don't know if you can hear that but uh before i could almost count the rpm this time it's just a buzz that's way better let's see uh if we're able to keep this thing from throttling again now i know we're not starting from an idle temp but the max temp really won't rely on that so as long as we can keep this thing right around 80 to 85 i think we'll be fine although i seriously doubt it's gonna do that because we're already hitting 81 degrees all right so even at full speed the knock to a 40 millimeter fan is also a no-go so i think that all ended how we thought it would however i'm not done with this little knock to a fan because like i mentioned this little control board is capable of more than 12 volts which means we should be able to overvolt this fan so long as it doesn't break or shut down on us let's give that a whirl all right so we're running at 17 volts now so we're 5 volts overclocked let's see what that does well i think we might be holding steady at still thermal throttling but uh at 88 degrees celsius yeah we're bouncing between 873 and 950 so still not enough cooling let's give it just a little bit more all right that's 20 volts still haven't gotten back to below 87 but our clock speed is all the way back up to 950 so we're we're right on the edge of this being actually usable albeit with a custom fan controller on here all right so that is 24.5 volts that is all i'm comfortable giving this uh this step up adapter um we're still at 87 degrees but we're back up to stock speeds you can see we've hit 1 114 megahertz hey we've actually there it is we jumped all the way back up to 1225. this 40 mil fan albeit double its rated voltage might be enough to cool this card let's see if it's able to pull it down below 87 because that's definitely warmer than i'm comfortable running this graphics card at this is how fast this thing is spinning supposedly if this does 5000 rpm at 12 volts this noctua was spinning at roughly 10 000 rpm honestly it's not that loud for being that fast so yes in theory you could cool a graphics card like a tesla m24 capable of drawing 215 watts with a single knocked to a 40 millimeter fan uh i didn't think i was going to confirm that but i don't think i can stop there i think there's uh some beefier fans that we can throw out this card before we move on to the larger fans so let's give these a whirl so it is off with the noctua fan and on with the delta blower now unfortunately i don't have screws that are long enough to go through the delta blower and screw into these nice little threaded inserts i added to the fan shroud so uh we're gonna electrical tape them on when you know what the rules are you're allowed to break the rules all right that looks like an nvidia stock configuration doesn't it now you might have noticed this fan has an unusual set of cables coming out the end of it this is just a positive and negative wire uh that's because this actually came out of a 1u network switch i rescued it from a switch that had died it's a great blower fan that runs at 12 volts but it didn't have a standard fan connector so i can't plug this into my pc and have it controlled by the pc rather i'm using another one of the usb step up boards and i have the same terminal connectors connected to a positive and negative wire and we're just going to screw those together and then electrical tape the positive side of this so we don't ground it out on anything it'll be fine don't do this at home i see no problems with that alright so we are already significantly louder than the noctua i don't think that's surprising to anyone and we're running at 8.3 volts let's go ahead and get this thing up to 12. there we go 12 volts all right so 12 volts on the little blowy matron here and we are idling right around 29 degrees which is actually where we idled with the giant blower fan now obviously i'm not expecting the same performance but it is nice to see the temperature all the way down in that range and once again let's go ahead and fire up heaven well we're about 60 seconds in we haven't thermal throttled yet so i'd say that's a win over the noctua although this fan may be more annoying than the delta blower uh it is so high pitched it is just piercing through every other sound in this room strangely enough it sounds exactly like running a 1u network switch in my office right now there is a decent amount of air coming out the back of the card and uh you know here about almost two minutes in we're running 58 degrees celsius let's go ahead and see where we level out that gets rambo's getting up on top that should definitely improve the airflow don't you come down here so that people can see you come here believe it or not we have actually leveled out at 72 degrees celsius this little 40 millimeter fan is keeping that graphics card cool i would not have called that now obviously this is far from silent it's definitely not a fan that i would want to run in a gaming rig but it does work but you know what's better than one fan how about two fans uh what happens if i tape another fan onto the back of that fan do we increase the pressure and increase the airflow all while spinning slower and hopefully at a less irritating pitch let's find out isn't that beautiful and you know what's great about my quick connect terminals all i have to do is feed this other one on top of there and put the nut back in and i have two fans connected to the same controller [Music] what the hell am i doing all right one two three that's one of the most annoying things i've ever built you know that does move a decent amount of air and that's that's not too bad i mean it's still an annoying pitch and now there's two annoying sounds being made all right we are now running at 7 volts so let's go ahead and start this test again rambo's doing his best to make sure the cpu starves to death that 10850k feel good on your belly yeah all right 66 degrees and showing no signs of slowing down so far so this right here is about as loud as i would want my pc to run it's actually louder than i prefer uh we're leveling off right around 81 82 degrees uh i can't say that this is a great solution i mean obviously the noctua at 24 volts was able able to keep this thing cool uh i'm kind of disappointed that even underclocking these fans with two of them on there they're not pushing enough air to to really keep this thing in check yeah we're creeping up to 83 now i mean turning up the fan speed will obviously cool things down but in my opinion now we're even worse off than we were with the blower fan yeah that's just a horrible sound all right i have one last thing to test and that is the fresh off the presses uh this weird looking gpu fan shroud uh don't mind the captain tape that's to make sure that it's fully sealed on the bottom because the bottom layer came delaminated and well i'm not gonna wait another three and a half hours for another one to print uh anyway this is a fan shroud for the tesla model cards that i mentioned earlier that will hold an 80 millimeter standard case fan uh whether enough one of these can move enough air is another question entirely so let's go ahead and get this swapped out again you know the drill and uh we'll see how it does first and foremost i had to track down an 80 millimeter case fan and the only one that i had was this absolute piece of garbage so i don't hold out a lot of hope that this is actually going to perform well uh if this doesn't perform well i did print out a nifty little adapter that is somewhere there we go that'll take an 80 millimeter case hole and turn it into a 92 millimeter adapter so i can screw in this knock to a redux fan so hopefully one of these will get us the cooling performance and acoustic performance that we want this looks like it should fit but i think it's just ever so slightly too big inside there ah give me a couple minutes all right it's on there uh the problem was the m40 has a back plate on it and the back plate was just thick enough where it was interfering with this top lip on the top of the blower i could probably just shave that off and keep the back plate on there and in fact i think that's what i'm gonna do because there are thermal pads on some of the memory that's back here and i want the test to be as even as possible so let me go ahead and uh yeah and then we'll get to the thermal testing all right not the straightest cut in the world but hopefully there we go back plate and a shroud all right now we can test this all right so i've got a couple threaded inserts in the shroud and i've got a couple threaded inserts in the 80 to 92 millimeter adapter uh i think i'm going to just go for broke because i have absolutely no confidence in that weird 80 millimeter case fan that i found that i think came with one of the 2u rose wheel chassis that i got for like 65 dollars a piece not exactly a ringing endorsement for a fan so i think i'm just gonna jump straight to the noctua uh nfb9 redux this is a 1600 rpm fan uh we'll see how it does so i've given first impressions for the other ones i'll give you first impressions for this one as well uh this is not gonna work at at least at 12 volt uh so i've got my 12 volt speed controller turned all the way up uh there is barely any air coming out the back of this thing they don't make much better fans that are this quiet that are faster than 1600 rpm i'm gonna have to crank this thing with the step up controller to have any hope of cooling off this graphics card but that's why we test things all right idle temp sitting right around 30 degrees let's go ahead and launch heaven all right we're sitting at 58 degrees just uh just about 60 seconds into this test i'm gonna let this thing equalize and we'll see how far i have to crank it up just under three minutes we've hit 87c we are still overclocked but the throttling is inevitable and here it comes yeah so the 80 millimeter sorry 92 millimeter fan uh not quite enough not quite enough at least at 1 600 rpm let's see what kind of voltage is required to get this thing cooled off all right so we overclocked our fan by about fifty percent i gotta tell you that is still not loud at all but what i can tell you is the blowback from this card is insane uh yeah there's no air coming out of there this fan does not have enough static pressure and i think i'm gonna prove it in about another 10 seconds and just over a minute we are already back up to almost 80 degrees uh there's 10 times as much air being pushed back out of this shroud than is actually making it through the card just goes to show how much static pressure it takes to actually force air to go through heatsinks especially when they're as long as a full-length graphics card unfortunately it seems to take one of these all right i've got 24 volts going through this right now that's double fan speed so that's 3 200 rpm i will say the fan to noctibus credit is still very quiet but it's no match for this card none at all so there we have it three very different shroud designs and three very different results on the tesla m40 i don't think it's any surprise that the delta blower is by far the most efficient at cooling the tesla m40 however what is surprising is this electrical taped monstrosity came in second i'm honestly most disappointed in the 92 millimeter ducted fan i had really high hopes for this design uh unfortunately just goes to show you that unless you have a very high pressure fan it's pretty difficult to get air through one of these heatsink assemblies and well the thermal throttling goes to prove that i don't know what we learned here today but i hope you learned something i certainly learned that looks are only skin deep and sometimes performance requires a little bit of brute force if you liked this video make sure to hit that thumbs up button and subscribe to craft computing if you haven't done so already if you want to print any of these shrouds for yourself i will have thingiverse links down in the video description as well as links where to buy all the parts that i use today including the fans and the tesla m40 itself grab yourself some swag over at craft computing.store like this sweet craft computing t-shirt as well as hoodies bottle openers and glassware and if you like the channel and want to help support me in what i do consider joining the patreon or float plane links are also down in the video description that's going to do it for me in whatever this was thank you all so much for watching and as always i will see you in the next video cheers guys [Music] beer for today is from anchorage brewing company it is the better this way double ipa double dry hopped ipa with strata melba galaxy and moteku hops clocking in at 8.4 percent [Music] i have never met an anchorage i do not like [Music] i'm not going to say whether that's good or bad yet because honestly i'm not quite sure but even for an anchorage that is different this one's weird this one's really weird this beer is kind of like an inverted hazy try to follow me here uh this is not starting out with like this real sweet citrus note and then kind of devolving down into that that acid burn that we all know hazies tastes like rather this is kind of starting with almost like a a spicy acid burn up front like a like a habanero style spice but then the flavor evolves into this really sweet like passion fruit or guava towards the back end of it it's very different [Music] there it turns sweet like i said it's a little bit different i think i like it but it's definitely unique

Channel: Craft Computing

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Id: WfKQP2sARGY

Length: 31min 59sec (1919 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 29 2021