Thermal/Mechanical Reference Design

2.4Characterizing Cooling Solution Performance Requirements

2.4.1Fan Speed Control

Fan speed control (FSC) techniques to reduce system level acoustic noise are a common practice in server designs. The fan speed is one of the parameters that determine the amount of airflow provided to the thermal solution. Additionally, airflow is proportional to a thermal solution’s performance, which consequently determines the

TCASE of the processor at a given power level. Since the TCASE of a processor is an important parameter in the long-term reliability of a processor, the FSC implemented in

a system directly correlates to the processor’s ability to meet the Thermal Profile and hence the long-term reliability requirements. For this purpose, the parameter called

TCONTROL as explained in Section 2.2.6, is to be used in FSC designs to ensure that the long-term reliability of the processor is met while keeping the system level acoustic

noise down. Figure 2-14depicts the relationship between TCONTROL and FSC methodology.

Figure 2-14. TCONTROL and Fan Speed Control

Once the TCONTROL value is determined as explained earlier, the DTS temperature reading from the processor can be compared to this TCONTROL value. A fan speed control scheme can be implemented as described in Table 2-6without compromising

the long-term reliability of the processor.

Quad-Core Intel® Xeon® Processor 5400 Series TMDG

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Intel 5400 Series manual Characterizing Cooling Solution Performance Requirements, Fan Speed Control