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Upgrading the hat shelf server #hardware

🕗︎ - 2025-04-04
nvme temperature graph for the pas week, showing a jump up after the upgrade from around 50° to around 60°

It has been almost 6 years since I last upgraded my home server (except for the nvme).

Last time I went for a very low power CPU, an AMD Ryzen 5 2400GE (35W, 4/8 cores), and 64 GB of memory.

This time I switched to an AMD Ryzen 9 7900 (65W, 12/24 cores) and 128 GB of memory. The new motherboard has an AM5 socket (up from AM4) and uses DDR5 RAM (up from DDR4). It has two empty RAM slots left, so I can bump it further, and it also has an extra M.2 slot for another nvme. The ethernet port is 2.5 Gbit/s, but it's the only such on my home network, so that part isn't of much use.

CPU temperature graph for the past week, also showing a jump up

Even though the new motherboard (a Gigabyte B650M D3HP) is also a micro ATX, it was slightly longer than the old one, so I could not put the power supply in the same place as before. I managed to squeeze it in above the CPU cooler, but it covers ¾ of it, which is not ideal, as the fan is making a lot of noise now, where before it was almost completely silent.

Switching over was more of a faff than I expected - at first I had to guess that "CSM" is something I need to fiddle with to have the machine boot from the nvme at all.

CPU frequency graph for the last week, showing a nice jump up

More annoyingly, as soon as I had configured the BIOS for booting, the system stopped showing anything on the screen. The machine boots fine, but nothing appears on the monitor. I even tried connecting it with different cables ports, and to another screen.

After fighting with that for too long, I eventually connected the nvme (via a usb-enclosure) to my laptop, edited the /etc/network/interfaces file, updating the network interface name, and then put the machine back on the hat shelf.

Memory graph for the past week, showing the doubling but only slowly is more memory used now

The temperatures have gone up quite a bit - I'm thinking it is not ideal to have the CPU cooler blocked, so I am going to try pulling out the optical drive and repositioning the power supply at some point.

Besides the number of cores and the amount of CPU cache, the clock frequency is also up from around 1.8 GHz to 3.0 GHz, so all in all the server is more snappy now.

I haven't adjusted the configuration of PostgreSQL to use more memory, so the graph is only slowly showing the doubling making a difference.

🕗︎ - 2025-04-04 - 0 comments

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