Flat vs standing mounting and CPU temperature, Fujitsu Futro S920

Foreword: this might not be overly interesting, but I was surprised by the striking difference.

This is what I have seen after mounting this small box upright on the wall, after crafting two wall brackets: it is running 7-8 °C cooler. The workload remained similar throughout both weeks. While ambient temperature certainly affects core temperatures, its impact seemed less significant compared to the direct effect of the new mounting position.

Screenshot from a Grafana dashboard, data sampled via Prometheus Node Exporter:

While I’m on the topic of this former thin client, I should mention its power consumption: 0.27 kWh per day. It’s being used as a Proxmox PVE cluster with a relatively light average CPU utilization of 15%, and it includes a Mini PCIe SATA controller and four SSDs. For the sake of completeness, it mounts an AMD GX-415GA.