Comment by scottlamb

> You may even be able to get away with passive cooling at the 65W range.

I saw there's a "passive" Dynatron A43, which even claims to handle up to 155W. My understanding is that most/all server motherboards will have the socket oriented so the fins are front-to-back and the RAM is off to the side. And then you have chassis fans blowing air front-to-back, so I think they basically double as the CPU fan. (Which is also what the older motherboard that came in my CSE-813M did.) I air-quoted passive because I think it needs those chassis fans, but there's not one on the CPU anyway. And I'm not sure I completely trust the A43's rating, but with this setup I think it'd be fine for my 65 W TDP CPU at least.

On the other hand, I'm using a cheap gaming motherboard with fins sideways, RAM blocking the front-to-back airflow. My gut says that Dynatron A43 wouldn't do well. I don't understand why this orientation is desirable for desktops; my conspiracy theorist side says they make the consumers ones this way so they won't eat into the rack-mounted server market share. I am kinda tempted to get a server motherboard for this and IPMI (and/or at least serial port-accessible BIOS), but I started by looking at budget NASes and things have already spiraled a bit from there.