Technical Product Specification

Platform Management Functional Overview Intel

Server Board S2400EP TPS

Intel order number G50763-002 Revision 2.0

Events logged to the SEL can be viewed using Intel’s SELVIEW utility, Embedded Web Server,

and Active System Console.

6.8 System Fan Management

The BMC controls and monitors the system fans. Each fan is associated with a fan speed

sensor that detects fan failure and may also be associated with a fan presence sensor for hot-

swap support. For redundant fan configurations, the fan failure and presence status determines

the fan redundancy sensor state.

The system fans are divided into fan domains, each of which has a separate fan speed control

signal and a separate configurable fan control policy. A fan domain can have a set of

temperature and fan sensors associated with it. These are used to determine the current fan

domain state.

A fan domain has three states: sleep, nominal, and boost. The sleep and boost states have

fixed (but configurable through OEM SDRs) fan speeds associated with them. The nominal

state has a variable speed determined by the fan domain policy. An OEM SDR record is used to

configure the fan domain policy.

System fan speeds are controlled through pulse width modulation (PWM) signals, which are

driven separately for each domain by integrated PWM hardware. Fan speed is changed by

adjusting the duty cycle, which is the percentage of time the signal is driven high in each pulse

6.8.1 Thermal and Acoustic Management

This feature refers to enhanced fan management to keep the system optimally cooled while

reducing the amount of noise generated by the system fans. Aggressive acoustics standards

might require a trade-off between fan speed and system performance parameters that

contribute to the cooling requirements, primarily memory bandwidth. The BIOS, BMC, and

SDRs work together to provide control over how this trade-off is determined.

This capability requires the BMC to access temperature sensors on the individual memory

DIMMs. Additionally, closed-loop thermal throttling is only supported with buffered DIMMs.

6.8.2 Fan Profiles

The server system supports multiple fan control profiles to support acoustic targets and

American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE)

compliance. The BIOS Setup utility can be used to choose between meeting the target acoustic

level or enhanced system performance. This is accomplished through fan profiles.

The BMC supports eight fan profiles, numbered from 0 to 7.

Table 16. Fan Profiles

Type

Profile

Details

OLTT

Acoustic, 300M altitude

OLTT

Performance, 300M altitude