Dell 8400 - Proprietary?

DemonOfTheFall

A mate of mine wants to move his Dell 8400 to a new case because he's having terrible heat related problems in that stifling Dell case.

Anyone know if Dell used proprietary bits in the 8400 ?

I know that they sometimes do and sometimes don't, but don't know if they do or don't in this partiucular model.

Cheers

bullhammer

Hi
The main problem you will have will be motherboard terminals - these are not layed out as they are on standard ATX motherboards; the terminals are standard enough but they are in the wrong places for a generic ATX case, so it may not fit correctly, and if you can get it in then it won't be without modification. I wouldn't be surprised if the screw holes holding the motherboard in the case were standard, again a big issue and not something that you could easily rectify.
The other snag is the massive heat-pipe assembly on the CPU - this will need to be replaced because I doubt very much that the case you buy will be able to support this, it's a large assembly and you need that massive 120mm exhaust hole at the rear, plus bracket points to hold the thing in place
Also the PSU mainboard supply is non standard from what I can tell, so it probably won't be of any use on another motherboard.
So, apart from the motherboard, CPU cooler and PSU, the other components should be pretty much off-the-shelf, so if you *really* want to move to a new case, I'd suggest buying a new (make sure it's compatible with the memory AND CPU) motherboard, power supply unit, and a nice silent heatsink/fan assembly, and then put them (plus the exsiting bits) into a new case
Sorry, but that's Dell for you
They make everything proprietary so that you are forced to buy replacement parts from them

tba

Is there no way for you to add a few extra holes/fans?

8T8

If getting it into another case doesnt work out what you could do is check the space around the CPU and remove Dell cooler and install Zalmans big CNPS 9500 cooler that should hopefully keep temps under control for the CPU.

If you wanted to go the extra mile grab one of Zalmans coolers for the graphics cards GPU and chipset as well.

Airblazer

DemonOfTheFall wrote:

A mate of mine wants to move his Dell 8400 to a new case because he's having terrible heat related problems in that stifling Dell case.

Anyone know if Dell used proprietary bits in the 8400 ?

I know that they sometimes do and sometimes don't, but don't know if they do or don't in this partiucular model.

Cheers

what kind of heat related probs??
There shouldn't be a prob with this chassis overheating..
I was running a P4 3.4GHz, 2 H/D's (Raptor) plus 2xDVD's.
X850XT PE + Audigy 2+ Firewire card...with no probs..


check to make sure that all fans are clean and that all vents are free from dust...

DemonOfTheFall

He has a similar setup to that, the case is absolutely roasting inside. He has to use ATITOOL to force the GPU fan to 100% or else it overheats in minutes. The hard drives feel absolutely roasting while they sit in their bays, not hot enough to burn, but way warmer than a hard drive should be. I've seen him get thermal throttling issues on the CPU while at LANs before.

Main problem is just the woeful amount of air which is pulled through the case. Already added one 80mm fan pulling air through the HDD bay. Still not enough though really, all the fron of the case is mainly solid steel with no ventilation holes.

I think we're just going to go down the new Case/Mobo/PSU route.

He has a 925X chipset at the moment, with a P4 3.4 in it. Can I drop that same chip into a 975X ? If he's getting a new motherboard i think that he should get the latest chipset.

Also, anyone know if any of these spanky new chips intel recently announced will be able to be dropped into a 975X board?

Thanks for the help guys.

netwhizkid

I have a Dell 8400, Not exactly the most stylish, but it sure has the horsepower to get the job done! 3.4Ghz 160GB and 14months old and is still easily hammering the bog standard pcs on the market today. Costing just under €1,500 it would want to be. It is a great pc and I have being using it in conjunction with a Skydsl PCI card for 10months now. A very good computer and I have never had any over heating issues, then again I don't go opening the thing too often to check, Mine has two fans. One of which is directly funneling air onto the mobo at all times.

Wertz

My current rig is an 8400 with a 3.4g, gb of RAM, 6800, raid0 HDDs, audigy sb2, dual dvd drives....absolutely no overheating issues (using all the stock fans/dell fans)
The intake for the case is at the front at the very bottom....and it does tend to clog with dust and fluff. Mine's a noisy beast, but it runs cool. Admittedly it's not running games 24/7.

Sure your mate hasn't lost a fan somewhere? Or got a badly clogged input/exhaust?

DemonOfTheFall

No I'm definite all the fans are working. It's been given a good going over a lot of times, it is a dust free zone.

He's on his third PSU, second graphics card and second motherboard. Dell just don't seem to have designed a chassis that can handle the kit they put into it. The machine couldn't even get into a game when he received it, they gave him one a 350w PSU for a P4 3.4 with 2 gigs of ram, x800xt, RAID 0 hard drives + audigy 2. Their engineering leaves more than a little to be desired in my opinion.

Main question now is 975X compatibility. If we get a 975X board can we just drop the chip into it ? I'm nearly sure that we could, just want to make a little more certain. Wish there were some conroe compatible 975x boards around... Word has it all the board needs is updated VRMs and it's good to go.

8T8

These are the CPU's supported by Intels own brand 975x motherboard so it should apply to all of the other vendors as well.

If you swapping out equipment I'd personally go for a Tagan PSU, Lian Li case and a Zalman CNPS 7700-Cu series CPU cooler, all good quality components.

irlrobins

DemonOfTheFall wrote:

they gave him one a 350w PSU for a P4 3.4 with 2 gigs of ram, x800xt, RAID 0 hard drives + audigy 2. Their engineering leaves more than a little to be desired in my opinion

Same spec I'm running and no probs with my 8400. Something v wrong if after replacing all those parts it's still not working....

Cuddlesworth

8T8 wrote:

If getting it into another case doesnt work out what you could do is check the space around the CPU and remove Dell cooler and install Zalmans big CNPS 9500 cooler that should hopefully keep temps under control for the CPU.

If you wanted to go the extra mile grab one of Zalmans coolers for the graphics cards GPU and chipset as well.

Will not work as dell even have different mount holes than the standard.