Liquid Cooling Solution for Orion O6

#1

02 July 2025

Hi all,

Could you please share your experience with an active liquid cooling solution for Orion O6?

Also, any performance air cooler for Orion O6, please.

Thank you,

Karips.

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#2

For liquid cooling to be useful, we would need to be able to overclock the SoC.

I have installed a Cooler Master i71C which can be gotten for cheap, doesn’t require any modifications to be used and I have never seen the CPU temperature go over 45 C, not even when running compiler jobs on all 12 cores.

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#3

Hi assert64,

Thank you for your kind reply.

Wondering, if anyone tried to build a home NAS using Orion O6?

Or should I go for Latte Panda Sigma?

Karips.

#4

Not tried to build a NAS from the O6, honestly it’s overkill. Rock 5B/5B+ are way more balanced for this. A NAS doesn’t need 12 ArmV9 cores to move data between network and SSDs. The O6 should really be seen as a desktop, small workstation or developer’s machine IMHO.

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#5

Thank you willy for your kind advice. Much appreciated.

Wondering, if anyone tried to install Windows 11 Arm variant on O6?

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#6

On the other hand Rock 5B/5B+ has bit limited i/o. It’s really great for 2.5G NAS with few drives, but there is not much space for 10G ethernet (it’s of course possible) and some LSI card. Orion already bumped ethernet to 2x 5GBit and has slot for small AQC113 (10G ethernet) plus full size pcie slot for LSI card. This makes just far more option for bigger NAS.

CPU still can be used for ZFS + transcode, yes it will idle mostly but nowadays You put some additional services on docker to NAS, those needs some juice :slight_smile:

#7

Well, I beg to disagree Dominik :slight_smile: I had done precisely this with mine a year ago, using an AQC107 chip by then, which should now be replaced with AQC113:

https://wtarreau.blogspot.com/2024/05/an-affordable-10gbe-capable-nas.html

And it does reach just 10G with a high enough CPU load but the whole design remains under reasonable thermal control. For me the box is warm with the fan unplugged.

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#8

Oh, your the HAProxy guy… I use to use it back in the early 2000’s along with LVS-DR. A nice piece of software.

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#9

It’s rather small NAS with only four drives. Reasonable, but You can’t expand it more. If You wish to have yet another pool with 3.5 inch drives it would be hard to add it without transfer limits. By “limited” I meant that there is not much i/o to add LSI controller and 10G.
Of course I was able to add pcie switch and lsi card and 2x aqc113 to 5B utilizing full 4x pcie 3.0, but it’s not that easy as just having more pcie ports. Orion has more pcie ports, more bandwidth, it’s just easier to build bigger NAS.

One of main upgrades to AQC113 is that it can work on 1x pcie 4.0. This is perfect on orion for m.2 e slot. Just add LSI card to pcie slot and there is really nice semi-pro NAS.