hrs wrote:@dasmanul - the potential is large. Imagine 70 standalone computers ( or clustered ) @150Watt in 3U form. Some of our customers use it for dedicated server rental ( even its rpi its still better than virtual server ) and some using as hardware h264 transcoder. About heatsinks u right, but in version1 case we used different fixation, so now they look like turned wrong. But it does not matter they do not generate too much heat, even without heatsinks they working fine.
Heat convection is naturally vertical and likely to be more significant near the surface of the heatsink than the air movement caused by the fans. The fans are needed to prevent heat from accumulating inside the box, but it is likely the current configuration for the heatsinks is the right one.
The only way to know for sure is to measure the internal CPU temperature with the heatsinks in one orientation and again in the other orientation. To negate the effects of silicon variations, the exact same Pi computers should be used for both tests.
For dedicated server rental, individual Pi computers may have certain security advantages over virtual servers. For example side-channel attacks based on shared caches could be avoided. At the same time 1GB RAM and 100mbit networking speed could be limiting. Does the h264 transcoder application leverage the GPUs?