Automatic Rheobusses
Posted by John-Erik | Filed under Uncategorized
Well, personally, I do like automatic rheobusses (I still don’t get why they’re called that - they’re rheostats glued to a plate, but whatever …) and automatic fan control in general, that way I know what my temp is to within a couple of degrees without even looking.
Interesting tidbit about those: did you know that if a fire starts in an Intel server (chassis and mobo) and that the fans will turn up high enough to actually in most cases put out the fire? It’s done by both modulating the fan speed and also dynamically turning fans on and off (since most of them have banks of fans) through a seperate server controller embedded into the chassis and using something like an i960 processor. A good 4U rackmount can pull over 100 CFM of air through it, more than enough to put out the fire. If it starts in some of the bigger servers, the affected components can even be replaced without taking the system down.
So for the next person that tells you that AMD makes just as good a server as an Intel box, you can quietly refute them with that simple fact alone.
