Cooling
Now keeping that i9-7960X cool in the 2U rack-mounted case does bring up concerns. The 165-watt TDP is a lot of heat to deal with and the case doesn’t have a lot of height for a large cooler like a normal PC might have. Silverstone did have a 2U cooler available with support for a traditional LGA2011 CPU socket so they sent over the XE02-2011 when they sent over the RM21-308.
The XE02-2011 is 90mm wide and 90mm deep to fit the square LGA2011 mounting and then to fit inside of the 2U case it is a total of 65mm tall. Silverstone went with a 60mm fan which is about as big as you can fit once you add the mounting plate on the bottom of the cooler. The XE02-2011 has three copper heatpipes that run right on top of the copper contact surface to help pull the heat up into the heatsink. Then the fan runs up to 9000 RPM which is crazy fast and I imagine very loud as well but we will see. They do have the noise level listed at 55dBA in the specification. They have the airflow at 50.4 CFM and with dual ball bearings on the fan, it has an expected life of 70,000 hours which is just under 8 years. Sadly the XE02-2011 doesn’t have a TDP listed, so I can’t be completely sure if it will handle our 165 watt i9-7960X, but we will find out.
The XE02-2011 comes with thermal paste preinstalled and because it is designed specifically for 2011 and 2066 socket CPUs you don’t have any mounting bracket to change out as well.
Just to get ready for building in the system soon I did go ahead and put together all of the components I went over today. I was able to drop the i9-7960X into the X299 Micro. Then installing the XE02-2011 was as simple as screwing down the four spring loaded mounting screws. Then getting the Ballistix memory installed in the four slots. All it is missing is the Crucial P5 that I previously took a look at and I could boot everything up!
