Dell Inspiron HSF

[woody75]

I bought my wife a Dell Inspiron with a Q6600 a couple years ago and she just got a new desk. The CPU cabinet has 2 small holes for airflow and that computer is baking in there. Core Temp shows 66-69C across the cores and I think she needs to see about a better cooler.

Does anyone have experience adding an aftermarket cooler to a Dell? I hate doing anything on her computer because she can't afford any downtime on it so I'm looking for a painless solution if anyone has one.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions/info.

 

[woody75]

Oh, and those temps are idle/Windows light tasks...

 

[BillParrish]

I suggest you look at more from a carpentry point of view as no matter what heatsink you put in there, the high ambient temps inside that cabinet (baking in there) is going to make any heatsink run hot. It might be best to enlarge/add a decent hole of some kind at the bottom rear of that cabinet and then another at the top rear. If you really want to solve the issue, with a jigsaw (you can buy a hole saw the right size but a good one costs more than the inexpensive jigsaw) cut a hole for a 120mm fan. Splice into the fan wires to lengthen them, the small Grey wire-nuts would work fine, and plug into a molex in the PC so when the PC is started the fan comes on and vents that compartment. Then you you eventually replace the Dell you will not have to worry about a heatsink on the new machine. I say 120mm as they are the quietest, but any size fan would do wonders and think about the ones that have a temp sensor built into the fan to control fan speed. You would not need a high speed fan, 1200 rpm 120mm would be quiet and move plenty of air compared to the size of the cabinet.

Even better but requiring more woodworking skill would be to insert/whatever a vent/grill into the door of the cabinet at the bottom so the rear fan would tend to suck cool room air in from that front vent/grill. This would both pull cool air in where the Dell would be more likely to grab/intake some of it as well as keep heat from building up in the cabinet.

The air cooling guys should have some heatsink recommendations, I water cool and have not see the inside of a Dell in a while.


edit, oh and there are printable PDF files for fan cutout templates to make it easy, hmm where....http://www.sbea.mtu.edu/users/mpheyse/PC-Fan-Cutout-Template.pdf

 

[woody75]

Great info, thanks! I already plan to cut a hole in the back of the desk but hadn't thought about installing a fan over it.

 

[ehume]

Since you're going to put a hole in the desk and not the computer, you might wish to put an AC fan in there. Something like this.

 

[Siorus]

Since you're going to put a hole in the desk and not the computer, you might wish to put an AC fan in there. Something like this.

Good idea, but he might actually be better off with a DC fan for a few reasons:

1. Noise- the fan you linked to is rated at 85cfm. 85cfm 120mm fans are not quiet. At all.
2. Safety- 120VAC is considerably more dangerous than 12vdc; it's awfully hard to mess up the wiring on a fan, but it can be done and if you mess up badly enough you could end up giving yourself or someone else a rather unpleasant surprise, if not worse.
3. Energy use-there's no need for the fan to be running when the computer is not. It would be far easier to run a power lead out the back of the computer and let it turn on/off with the computer than it would be to unplug or switch on/off an AC fan.

woody, I suggest you take Bill's advice and install a fan in the cabinet. Alternatively, simply cut the back off the cabinet entirely (assuming it's not a structural component) and remove the door. Something like this would work pretty well. It has those stupid blue LEDs on it, and it's not the quietest fan in the world for the air it flows, but it's got a very, very wide speed range, it can be controlled either with a temperature sensor or manually, and the curve they use for speed control with the temperature sensor is pretty aggressive, so it ought to keep things relatively cool. Alternatively, you could look at these, although their speed range is narrower and I have no idea how they compare quality-wise to the Thermaltakes (not that the Tt fans are of especially high quality themselves, but they're acceptable for this application).

There are other ways to get temperature-controlled fan speeds, but they're more expensive ($50 for the fan controller) and I think they're overkill for your needs. If you don't care about thermal control, this would be my recommendation.

Like Bill said though, you really, really, really need to consider putting some kind of vent in the front of the enclosure and/or having your wife leave the cabinet open. Axial fans are basically incapable of generating any significant amount of air pressure, be it positive or negative, and if all you do is install an exhaust (or intake) fan, you're not going to accomplish much. It'll be better than nothing, sure, but you could halve the airflow of the fan (or more) by not giving it the ability to breathe in the form of a vent or another fan.

As far as your heatsink question goes, there are a bunch of decent heatsinks out there for the Q6600. The big questions are a. whether your dell has standard s775 heatsink mounting holes, b. whether it's going to complain if you connect a non-Dell fan to the CPU fan header, and c. assuming that a and b aren't issues, how much do you want to spend on this heatsink?

The older Dells (I'm talking Slot 1 era) would pitch a fit if you didn't use their proprietary fans, because the 3rd wire wasn't used for a conventional tach signal. I'm not sure if they still do that or not. If they do, you're probably SOL. Only way to find out for sure if nobody else has tried it is going to be to hook up a normal 3 pin/4 pin pwm fan to it and see what it does. Without knowing what model of Inspiron it is it's hard for me to get any additional information. There are a bunch of heatsinks that will handle a stock clocked Q6600 with room to spare though, and many of them aren't horrifically expensive, either.

If you need a relatively low profile cooler, the old Zalman orb style CNPS7000/7500/7700/8700s work just fine. They won't set any records, but they're not bad heatsinks at all-particularly the 8700s; the 8700NT on my Q9650 at work keeps it well under 60*C even in Prime95, and I could get better performance out of it if I disabled fan speed control in the BIOS. If you can fit a "tower" style heatsink in there, there are all kinds of options on the market. Xigmatek makes a number of cheap tower style heatsinks that perform OK and are pretty cheap, but so do any number of other companies. If you really want the best performance you can get you're going to need to look at something like a Prolimatech Megahalems, a Thermalright Ultra Extreme 120, a Noctua NH-D14, or something along those lines. But those are overkill in the extreme for a stock-clocked Q6600, they may give you clearance issues in the Dell's case, and they're not cheap. And again, like Bill said, they're not going to help you out a whole lot if the machine is just recirculating air inside the cabinet.