SomethingAboutUsers

My homelab has expanded recently to include an RX720 with 12x SAS drives. It all sits in my mechanical room with the furnace, hot water tank, deep freeze, and beer fridge, all of which make heat too. The mechanical room is a decent size, but is behind an always-closed door in my developed basement.

The issue isn't so much the heat as the noise from the 720, which occasionally decides to ramp the fans all the way up (or at least, quite high). I've tried applying a static fan profile which of course shuts it up, but sooner rather than later it exceeds the temperature threshold and then blows 100% to cool off for a while. My daughter's room is downstairs and so is my office, but you can also hear the server everywhere in the house when it ramps up, so I'm trying to minimize the noise.

The mechanical room has no real venting in it. Obviously all the venting in the house leads there, but there is neither a hot air register nor a cold air return in the actual room.

So the question is this: would cutting a smallish hole in the cold air return vent (which is conveniently right above the 720) completely eff up the air balance in the rest of the house, given that it's so close to the furnace itself? Or would that be a reasonable way to help vent the hot air in that room to where it belongs?

Any insight would be appreciated.