Thanks for the review Dogie - much appreciated.
Can you estimate space between units when mounted in a rack for the possibility of wrapping the case in sound-absorbing material?
Do you think that there is enough space to attach a water-cooling mod to the system?
I wonder if a sound-dampening vent tunnel could be attached to the back of the PSU to reduce some of the worst sound.
Cheers.
If its a 1.25 U server, then there should be 0.5U between two on one side, and 0U on the other. Ie 0.5U above and 0U below. This does degrade cooling performance as the bottom side is essentially a huge heatsink, and a LOT of heat is removable from there with extra airflow. That surface also gets exceedingly hot when in quiet mode so I wouldn't risk putting a material in there.
In quiet, the only noise is the PSU fan (40mm) and the subsequent vibration it generates. In normal, the fans are loud but you can't sound dampen them.
Your waterblock would have to be around 17mm thick at max, and may be cost prohibitive due to the unusually large area of the chips (2x 475 x 440mm). I'm not sure you'd want to risk cooling the PSU internally, or if its even possible. If we pretend that the PSU can't be software controlled (which it can over I2C pins), your best chance at modding it would be an extension cable from the control board out the back of the case, to a custom PCB with 24 pin ATX, 8 pin ATX, 6xPCIE 8 pins etc so it can be powered by a 'silent' ATX psu. Would defeat the purpose of 1.25U though.
