I’ve had this AMD Instinct mi100 sitting around for waay too long unused.. I tried a couple of different cooling options a while ago, but neither worked satisfactorily, and so it went back on the shelf pending a bit more free time. Of course, “free time” is a myth, I should be more honest and call it “stolen time”!
My incentive for getting off my arse and getting this working was the newer LLM releases, where CPU inference just wasn’t cutting it, and neither was GPT OSS anymore. Now I’ve got the card installed, I’ll move on to trying to get two different AMD GPU’s working to give me enough VRAM to hopefully run QWen-3.5-27B in all its glory.
Goldilocks mi100 cooler list
Here’s some of the cooling options I tried, or baulked at..
| https://www.printables.com/model/1243484-mi100-fan-shroud-v2 | Looks great, very 1950’s Cadillac rear fin style! Too tall for my (then) case |
| https://www.printables.com/model/1229329-shroud-for-amd-instinct-mi50-workstation-gpu-and-b | I printed this one.. bought the fan.. and er mah gawd. LOUDNESS! |
| https://www.printables.com/model/548957-mi100-dual-40mm-fan-shroud | I printed this one too.. installed a couple of Noctua NF-A4x20 PREMIUM FANs I had sitting around (the caps are on the box, not my shouting). Solved the silence issue – but temps were a little higher than I’d like. |
| https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:7189349 | I considered buying a second card so I could use this.. luckily my wallet said to my brain “back away you idiot! get the first one working!”. |
| https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:7153218 | And this one, seemed like it could be.. not too hot, not too loud.. Just right <aaah>! |
Making it work
First step was buying a CPU cooler from a Dell. The extremely talented Mr MagentL who designed this print, and clearly sciences, recommended:
- EFH-08E12W-JP01 (recommended by MagentL)
- BUC1012SJ-00
- BAZB0925R2U
Sadly, the recommended one turned up just results of the specific fan but as a case fan and not in the cooler. However I snagged the Dell part number off the ebay listings, and ended up searching for this:
(TKR4X,07D86K,7D86K)Magic! If you live in the USA that is where there’s plenty of them and cheaply. Hobson’s choice here in Oz, although I did managed to snag the only local one for not too much money:
Except mine wasn’t on the list, so I ended up printing all the parts to see which might fit best. Excuse the potato quality prints, this was me getting the hang of a new filament, TPU, instead of my usual PLA.
It turned out, for the fan in my cooler (FOXCONN PVB120G12H-P01), the recommended EFH* shroud fit best, although it didn’t quite clip in with one of the clips. Note that the various fans have a range of power comsumption, being rated anywhere between 0.66A to over 1A. The lowest one is a sexy “Maglev” fan from Sunon but I went with cheap, not “sexy magnetic levitation” (hoverboards!) so I don’t know how noisy that one is.
A quick hacksaw later, and I was able to screw it onto the end of the mi100, which handily has the same mounting holes as an MI50 or mi60. I used some M3x10mm screws, as the stock screws from the mi100 were too short to fit through the 3d-print.
Here it is, tucked up snug in my case.. its audible at idle, but not too intrusive and I haven’t sorted out the fan tuning to lower its speed at low temps.
And talking of temps.. the mi100 is device zero, so its idling cooler than my 7900xtx, despite drinking more power.
Hooroo!
