https://www.pcmag.com/news/nvidia-tips-new-liquid-cooled-gpu-jetson-ai-devices-at-computex

???? Ok having worked in some fairly large data centers in the past and knowing what I do about servers, when the hell have they ever needed a water cooled GPU? 99.9999 percent of the time the video isn't even being used because the KVM is switched to a different server and those that are selected are usually sitting on a static lock screen or they should be. Hell really big data centers dont even have anyone go into the server room to make changes they do it using scripts or a management platform such as System Center or whatever the hell they are calling it this week.

The heat generated by the really low end GPUs is not what causes performance hits on servers its the heat generated by the processors and the huge amount of RAM that many of them run. This is why servers have ducted cooling and vapor chamber heat syncs in them with boo koo fans running at a deafening sound level. They wick the heat really efficiently and the jet turbine fans expel it out of the back of the unit immediately.

This is also why you can pack meat in a data center server room. Ours usually stayed at 58-62 degrees and that was for a mid sized room.

IMHO this just seems like someone at NVIDIA said in a board meeting one day, "Hey we could make these and the gamer nerds who are working on servers will eat it up!".

For workstations, especially ones running high end CAD programs and video processing software, yeah sure put in liquid cooled everything because they need it. Servers not so much because these types of programs dont run on servers, EVER. All CAD and video editing type softwares utilize the workstations graphics capabilities and use the servers for centralized storage and operational files. If you are running your CAD and graphics intensive products on a virtual PC hosted on a server you are doing it wrong and Autodesk etc will tell you so.( The owner of one company I worked for wanted to do this and Autodesk flat out told them it was a bad idea and that they would not support it if they did it. Luckily they listened to them.) Of course that doesn't matter to a good many managers. As far as AI goes I haven't worked with it but a distributed server environment with SSD drives seems like the perfect application for this.

For applications that do run on the back end such as SQL, ERP systems, etc., It's far more efficient to create a distributed server architecture and have multiple servers spread the load out among the members thus reducing the heat generated. It also has the added benefit of maying it much more fault tolerant in case one server has a problem users can keep working while that one server is replaced or repaired.

/server nerd rant

Edited May 26, 20223 yr by NetRngr