# Mounting a fan on an LSI SAS/SATA card heatsink



## MMacD (Aug 11, 2019)

I'm perhaps late to the fair with this, but #4 pan-head phillips sheet-metal screws work well in mounting Delta fans on heatsinks.  Only 2 are needed for a solid install.  Which is good because the sinks are fastened to the card by 2 sprung screws so there are only 2 corners free.  

The first job was to put a 40x40x15mm fan on a reflashed LSI 9220-8i card (supposedly it was a used IBM M1015, but it was probably a Chinese counterfeit, and has begun shedding ports).  It has a 12mm thick, leaved (not pronged) sink, and the 3/4" length worked well, spreading the leaves slightly as they bit in.  

For the replacement card, a new LSI 9207-8i HBA that has a 44x44x15mm pronged sink, 7/8" screws would have worked well, but I couldn't find any locally.  So I settled for cutting the tips off 1-inch screws and filing the cut ends to blunt points before installing them.  That appeared to work okay, though the prongs are far enough apart that the threads didn't bite very deeply.  I might later replace them with #6 screws, tho #6s are a tight fit and must be hand-selected from the bin to fit at all.

For translating to metric sizes, my caliper says the #4 "Everbilt"-brand screws I bought at Home Depot (a large US vendor of building material & similar) are 2.81 mm across the threads.  They were made in the PRC of course(!) so there's no guarantee that the next batch will caliper out the same, making it a good idea to buy enough for future use too.


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## Phishfry (Aug 12, 2019)

I just did the same project this weekend and made a 120mm fan bracket to cool my 3 Chelsio network cards. They run hot and have a spec for "minimal amount of airflow allowed" and really need the cooling.
I am using sysutils/ipmitool for monitoring. FAN A is my CPU heatpipe and FAN3 is my Slot Fan.

```
root@X9SRL:~ # ipmitool sensor | cut -f1-4 -d'|'
CPU Temp         | 39.000     | degrees C  | ok 
System Temp      | 31.000     | degrees C  | ok 
Peripheral Temp  | 32.000     | degrees C  | ok 
PCH Temp         | 43.000     | degrees C  | ok 
P1-DIMMA1 TEMP   | 31.000     | degrees C  | ok 
P1-DIMMA2 TEMP   | na         |            | na 
P1-DIMMB1 TEMP   | 31.000     | degrees C  | ok 
P1-DIMMB2 TEMP   | na         |            | na 
P1-DIMMC1 TEMP   | 34.000     | degrees C  | ok 
P1-DIMMC2 TEMP   | na         |            | na 
P1-DIMMD1 TEMP   | 33.000     | degrees C  | ok 
P1-DIMMD2 TEMP   | na         |            | na 
FAN 1            | na         |            | na 
FAN 2            | na         |            | na 
FAN 3            | 3900.000   | RPM        | ok 
FAN 4            | na         |            | na 
FAN A            | 2700.000   | RPM        | ok 
Vcore            | 0.864      | Volts      | ok 
3.3VCC           | 3.344      | Volts      | ok 
12V              | 11.766     | Volts      | ok 
VDIMM            | 1.504      | Volts      | ok 
5VCC             | 4.960      | Volts      | ok 
CPU VTT          | 1.008      | Volts      | ok 
VBAT             | 3.456      | Volts      | ok 
VSB              | 3.568      | Volts      | ok 
AVCC             | 3.344      | Volts      | ok 
Chassis Intru    | 0x1        | discrete   | 0x0100
```


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## aht0 (Aug 12, 2019)

MMacD said:


> The first job was to put a 40x40x15mm fan on a reflashed LSI 9220-8i card (supposedly it was a used IBM M1015, but it was probably a Chinese counterfeit, and has begun shedding ports).  It has a 12mm thick, leaved (not pronged) sink, and the 3/4" length worked well, spreading the leaves slightly as they bit in.


If you acquired it through eBay and it came from Chinese seller, it's 99,99% probable it was. Had one such for about 5 years, tho it served me faithfully until I resold the card. And yeah, it needed active cooling, warned the guy I sold it to about it as well.. I think I got fan for it from old Asus Neon PCIe x1 graphics card.


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