CPU Temperature and transcoding difficulties

[Pancackewaffle]

Alright so I have somewhat of a hybrid system because I had it lying around (Dell XPS 730X, i7-965 @ 3.7 Ghz, 12 GB of DDR3 RAM, H2C cooling unit, 1000 watt PSU, USB boot drive, seperate jail HDD with a single storage HDD). I also did things while installing FreeNAS for the first time because they were recommended and they just made sense (drive encryption).

I have run into somewhat of an interesting issue; I have plex running on here and when I test to see how many transcoded streams i can do at once i only get 1-2 1080p to 480p streams before i get warning messages on my console saying that there's a temperature warning, recommend shutdown. Now the i7-965 is no slouch with a passmark of 5,886 at stock speeds. And yes i read the Plex forums for what you should be able to achieve with certain passmark scores (taken with a grain of salt). The amount of streams is almost correct but the real question is what the deuce is with my temperatures and is it related to the encryption process as this CPU does not have AES-NI????

I use the command sysctl -a |egrep -E "cpu\.[0-9]+\.temp" to acquire the temperatures which are at idle 40-50, with one transcoded stream 75-85, and 2 transcoded streams 90+ (celsius). I used to have a windows 10 installation on there and with maximum CPU benchmarking it only ever got to 80 degrees and just held there...

Is there a limitation on temperatures on Windows 10 that I am unaware of that FreeNAS does not have? If so, can I add a maximum to FreeNAS so that it can throttle itself to keep the computer from dying?

 

[Ericloewe]

The difference might be due to the PCIe stuff and memory controller being exercised during transcoding, which would not be the case with a small CPU test.

That said, you definitely want to review cooling on that CPU.

 

[Pezo]

Definitely check your cooler or get a better one.
Maybe you just need to reapply thermal paste, maybe the cooler is not mounted properly. With halfway decent ventilation you should maybe get 80°C maximum.

 

[Pancackewaffle]

Well that cooler (H2C cooling Unit) is supposed to be pretty decent and the idle temperatures are the same as when i had windows 10 on there. I did just reapply thermal paste but I used cheap stuff that i had lying around. I'll go home tonight i use better paste, maybe thats my issue???
The ventilation is pretty phenomenal; 2 industrial type fans in from and one that i added in the back (sounds like a small tornado at 100%).

Although it still concerns me that FreeNAS allows the CPU to get that hot without some kind of limitation or wall.

 

[Chris Moore]

Alright so I have somewhat of a hybrid system because I had it lying around (Dell XPS 730X, i7-965 @ 3.7 Ghz, 12 GB of DDR3 RAM, H2C cooling unit, 1000 watt PSU, USB boot drive, seperate jail HDD with a single storage HDD). I also did things while installing FreeNAS for the first time because they were recommended and they just made sense (drive encryption).

I have run into somewhat of an interesting issue; I have plex running on here and when I test to see how many transcoded streams i can do at once i only get 1-2 1080p to 480p streams before i get warning messages on my console saying that there's a temperature warning, recommend shutdown. Now the i7-965 is no slouch with a passmark of 5,886 at stock speeds. And yes i read the Plex forums for what you should be able to achieve with certain passmark scores (taken with a grain of salt). The amount of streams is almost correct but the real question is what the deuce is with my temperatures and is it related to the encryption process as this CPU does not have AES-NI????

I use the command sysctl -a |egrep -E "cpu\.[0-9]+\.temp" to acquire the temperatures which are at idle 40-50, with one transcoded stream 75-85, and 2 transcoded streams 90+ (celsius). I used to have a windows 10 installation on there and with maximum CPU benchmarking it only ever got to 80 degrees and just held there...

Is there a limitation on temperatures on Windows 10 that I am unaware of that FreeNAS does not have? If so, can I add a maximum to FreeNAS so that it can throttle itself to keep the computer from dying?

The system you have is very similar to the Dell Precision T3500 systems that I used to support for my place of work for processing large Geo-databases and the thing we found was that the Windows OS does not warn you about the temperature, the system just slows down. I was running some third-party system monitoring software that allowed me to see when the system would thermal throttle due to the processor (a 6 core Xeon) getting too hot. The solution that worked for us (about 8 systems) was to remove the heat-sync and clean the CPU and heat-sync of the crusty dried-up old thermal compound and apply a fresh coat of Arctic Silver.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/New-Arctic-...mpound-3-5-g-grams-Paste-Grease-/172341959065

The temperatures came down by over 10 degrees and the systems completely stopped thermal throttling even when running at 100% for days.

 

[Stux]

Poor cooling. Or poor fan control. Or both.

 

[Chris Moore]

Well that cooler (H2C cooling Unit) is supposed to be pretty decent and the idle temperatures are the same as when i had windows 10 on there. I did just reapply thermal paste but I used cheap stuff that i had lying around. I'll go home tonight i use better paste, maybe thats my issue???
The ventilation is pretty phenomenal; 2 industrial type fans in from and one that i added in the back (sounds like a small tornado at 100%).

Although it still concerns me that FreeNAS allows the CPU to get that hot without some kind of limitation or wall.

The thought that occured to me is that the pump may not be running. If this is a liquid cooler that has been in the system for a long time, the pump may have stopped and it could have still been acceptable cooling until it was pushed hard by the video transcoding.
The Plex software uses the CPU really hard because it is strictly CPU encoding with no assist from the GPU and that is another big difference between Plex and anything in Windows. Windows uses primarily the GPU for any video processing and the CPU has fairly light use (comparatively) because the CPU in Windows is mostly just moving data between the system devices.

 

[Chris Moore]

Alright so I have somewhat of a hybrid system because I had it lying around (Dell XPS 730X, i7-965 @ 3.7 Ghz, 12 GB of DDR3 RAM, H2C cooling unit, 1000 watt PSU, USB boot drive, seperate jail HDD with a single storage HDD). I also did things while installing FreeNAS for the first time because they were recommended and they just made sense (drive encryption).

I have run into somewhat of an interesting issue; I have plex running on here and when I test to see how many transcoded streams i can do at once i only get 1-2 1080p to 480p streams before i get warning messages on my console saying that there's a temperature warning, recommend shutdown. Now the i7-965 is no slouch with a passmark of 5,886 at stock speeds. And yes i read the Plex forums for what you should be able to achieve with certain passmark scores (taken with a grain of salt). The amount of streams is almost correct but the real question is what the deuce is with my temperatures and is it related to the encryption process as this CPU does not have AES-NI????

I use the command sysctl -a |egrep -E "cpu\.[0-9]+\.temp" to acquire the temperatures which are at idle 40-50, with one transcoded stream 75-85, and 2 transcoded streams 90+ (celsius). I used to have a windows 10 installation on there and with maximum CPU benchmarking it only ever got to 80 degrees and just held there...

Is there a limitation on temperatures on Windows 10 that I am unaware of that FreeNAS does not have? If so, can I add a maximum to FreeNAS so that it can throttle itself to keep the computer from dying?

Take a look at this: http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/desktop/f/3514/t/19368055

 

[Pancackewaffle]

That is a very good point. I've heard of those coolers going too... I should've thought of that

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