With my recent AMD EPYC 9005 1P 4U server build using a Supermicro H13SSL-N motherboard, SilverStone kindly sent over their two Socket SP5 cooling options for AMD EPYC processors: the XE04-SP5 4U-compatible heatsink fan and then the XE360-SP5 AIO liquid cooler with a triple 120mm fan radiator to allow effectively cooling up to the new 400~500 Watt EPYC Turin processors. Here is a look at these two high-end AMD EPYC cooling options for those carrying out 4U EPYC 9004/9005 server builds along with thermal and performance benchmark results.
The SilverStone XE04-SP5 is a 4U form factor CPU heatsink fan exclusively for AMD Socket SP5 processors. The XE04-SP5 features five heatpipes and aluminum fins and features a single dual ball bearing PWM 92mm fan. The fan on this heatsink is rated for 43 dBA at full speed and moving up to 77.7 CFM.
The XE04-SP5 heatsink is quite straight-forward and similar to other SP5 heatsinks we commonly use on EPYC server builds. The build quality of the SilverStone XE04-SP5 is nice and what we’ve come to expect with testing SilverStone products at Phoronix over the past two decades.
The SilverStone XE04-SP5 is priced at around $99 USD from Internet retailers like Amazon (affiliate link). The pricing is comparable for what we’re used to seeing for other 4U-compatible active server heatsinks.
With the 5th Gen AMD EPYC processors going up to 500 Watt SKUs, those really wanting to push their EPYC servers hardware with HPC/AI compute workloads or just running one of the 500 Watt processors at constant load, the SilverStone XE360-SP5 is a closed-loop liquid cooling solution designed specifically for the Socket SP5 processors.
Originally I wanted to test this cooler with the EPYC 9965 192-core processor but sadly the Supermicro H13SSL-N motherboard only supports the EPYC CPUs up to 400 Watts… But as you’ll see from these results, the XE360-SP5 could easily cope with higher Wattage EPYC 9005 series processors.
The SilverStone XE360-SP5 features a nickel plated copper waterblock with large micro-channel copper base plate, integrated water pump within the radiator featuring 3 x 120mm fans. The pump is an aluminum alloy cavity design and features a three-phase, six-pole motor design. The SST-XE360-SP5 rubber tubing on this AIO liquid cooler is 460mm long to allow for installing it easily even within deep 4U rackmount servers. With all three 120mm fans at maximum speed the rated noise level is 46 dBA and with 87.72 CFM airflow.
The SilverStone XE360-SP5 AIO liquid cooler for AMD EPYC 9004/9005 servers is currently retailing for around $365 USD from the likes of Amazon (affiliate link). It’s comparable in pricing to other AIO liquid coolers for AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon 4U server platforms. With being a closed-loop design maintenance is easier and if really wanting to push a 400~500 Watt server CPU at constant load, it’s worth considering the investment.
For testing these AMD EPYC coolers that were kindly supplied by SilverStone as review samples, I was using the custom build with the Supermicro H13SSL-N motherboard with an AMD EPYC 9655 96-core 400-Watt processor given the power limits on the motherboard. SilverStone does have some great rackmount cases like the SilverStone RM51 5U and liquid cooling friendly SilverStone RM42 that was previously reviewed with SilverStone’s IceGem liquid cooling setup. For this server build though I ended up using a Rosewill RSV-L4500U 4U server chassis just as I had an extra one available and its depth can easily fit the large triple fan radiator within the chassis. The Rosewill 4U server chassis was also fitted with three 120mm intake fans and three 80mm exhaust fans.
With the Supermicro H13SSL-N and AMD EPYC 9655P 96-core processor were also 12 x 64GB DDR5-6000 Micron MTC40F2046S1RC64BDY QSFF memory and a 3.2TB Micron 7450 MTFDKCB3T2TFS NVMe SSD. This AMD EPYC Turin server was happily running Ubuntu 24.10 and all thermal testing was done while using the “performance” governor with the ACPI CPUFreq driver.
Across hours of benchmarks I was monitoring the CPU power consumption and CPU core thermals while separately testing both the SilverStone XE04-SP5 and XE360-SP5 coolers for evaluating their performance.
