In case any other panicked dell server noob shows up here with similar questions: even something as seemingly small as equal distribution of harddrives can impact temp. I only had 10 drives and filled the bottom two rows and top left two bays - right in front of CPU1. I moved the second from the left drive to the top-far-right bay and now the temps are balanced.
this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2023
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That sounds totally normal.
The airflow over the CPUs is not the same. My right CPU (as seen from the front) is always 2-4C hotter than the left. Under load, and if I have 16 spinning rust in the front, the right CPU may well be 4-5-6C hotter.
I wouldn’t worry about it.
CPU1 handles almost everything about being a normal computer: booting, chipset, most of the I/O, etc. CPU2 is along for the ride and handles its own I/O lanes (PCIe) and whatever work the kernel wants to send to it. The load is not symmetrical, so if you have turbo enabled, CPU1 will be consistently boosting more than CPU2 as it is handling all of its tasks —> warmer CPU1. This is why “tandem” dual-CPU setups have CPU1 upstream in airflow from CPU2.