Do you ever have those ideas that are really time consuming for not much reward? I get those a lot, and this one lodged in my head.

I've been running a Dell Wyse N06D thin client with a pair of 2.5" SSDs in USB enclosures cable-tied to it as my mail server for a while now, it works... but its a bit... rough.

"The motherboard in this is pretty small... I could put it into a 1U enclosure along with a power supply and drives and have plenty of room left over."

"In fact... I could build a dual-node one!"

"I don't need a second node and don't know what I'd do with it, but..."

And so that's how this project began.

Earlier this year, I built a server using a Supermicro X9DRi-LN4F+ motherboard in a custom case (build thread), it is loud. It is very loud.

Before starting this project, I took some baseline measurements - at idle, I recorded a noise level of 30 decibels in front of the server and both CPUs were hovering around 40C, after 10 minutes of running stress-ng --cpu 32, the recorded noise level was 73 decibels, the front CPU was hovering around 55°C and the rear CPU, ingesting the pre-heated air from the front CPU cooler was sitting around 75°C.

Not ideal.

I've always felt water cooling was unnecessary and overkill for computers... but with a server I can hear throughout the house whenever a CI job spins up on one of my projects, I'm willing to try it.