Ok sorry for this I am sure you see a ton of these Q's. I have a Dell 4550 with
P4, 512 ram and a 6600 oc apg gpu. I have start playing some 3d game and wanted to upgrade my fan. Well as some of you know that’s not an easy task with a Dell modo. Easy fix right? New Mobo? Should I upgrade my cpu or find a board for the one I have? What is a good a good board and cpu for around $300? Or should I just deal with what I have and upgrade later?

What fan are you wanting to upgrade and why? Your post doesn't make a lot of sense.

Well, you may find you have a non-standard case and can't fit a normal motherboard in (although a quick glance at some pictures it looks normal - not half-height or anything equally stupid).

The other thing I should point out is that your system should be ok for most new games - perhaps not at higher resolutions but you should be alright.

You might find that simply adding another 512Mb of RAM works wonders - 512Mb is a bit low for gaming these days, especially considering that thing has probably come loaded with unnecessary preloaded crap that's eating all your memory.

And as rugger says, it would help if you could explain exactly what you mean by 'upgrade my fan', and what you're hoping it will achieve.

I see you're still putting the scourge to that old Winnie. You have to come down to the mobo section due to the rampant fanboyism in the CPU Forum? I saw some of that BS and just quietly walked away - it's a load of crap!

We are all confused, when you say upgrade your fan I assume you mean the CPU fan? Dell's are known for having a case fan for the cpu fan and a shoud to direct the air over the heatsink.



A couply of years back I recall removing the shoud and putting a case fan directly on the featsink w/ a couple of long skinny zip ties because of the same problem I assume you have - the CPU becoming a bit hot under stress... and it solved the problem for less than 5 bucks and was only slightly louder than before.

edit - make sure you have the fan in front of the cpu, blowing toward the rear so it doesn't disrupt the case airflow (it should improve it in fact...)

Well the fan I have is real noisy and the it is only one fan in the case that has a green duct that goes over the cpu. My though was to upgrade my case, and add more memory along with a new board. I am play counter stike source with no problems I just don't want to fry anything due to poor air flow.

I know about all the crap that came on it and I slicked the HD as soon as I pulled it out of the box.

The Dell cpu fan for this model uses a proprietary 3 pin plug into the motherboard. I tried buying regular fans, but the bios said cpu fan error.

Yup... I was forced into running at stock speeds for a while, but since I finally got my new RAM it's all good ... I occasionally try to get a bit more speed out of it, but always end up having to reset CMOS, and now I've got a VGA silencer on my 6800, getting to the jumper is a real PITA... so I think I'll leave it be for a while. I can play HL2 with everything cranked up to max @ 16x12, so I'm happy for now.

The rampant fanboy explosion is annoying. Genuine requests for help/advice get buried under the idiots ...

I'm just doing my usual thing of flitting around between the various forums...

Probably your best bet. It is not uncommon for frustrated former dell owners to gut the whole dell system w/ the ps / mobo intact, bring it into their backyard and smashing it with a sledehammer. I have heard it is very therapudic, have not witnessed it yet but I imagine it would be akin to the printer scene in "office space"

I finally took the plunge and built my first of two new rigs. The one in my sig will be my wife's while I am overseas for a year. I tried a Sapphire X800GTO Fireblade at first, but the fan was whiny. Instead of upgrading to a silencer I went with an HiS IceQII - LOVE IT! I haven't pushed the 3200+ or the X800GTO very far so far, but it does everything that I need it to right now. Gotta love Folding with a 15% OC and CPU temps no higher than 37C. : I'll really get to torturing it later on...either it or the next rig I build.

Amen to that!

Probably your best bet. It is not uncommon for frustrated former dell owners to gut the whole dell system w/ the ps / mobo intact, bring it into their backyard and smashing it with a sledehammer. I have heard it is very therapudic, have not witnessed it yet but I imagine it would be akin to the printer scene in "office space"


Ok should I get a board for my P4 2.40 or look for to replace both?

Probably both, why upgrade a 478? One of my coworkers is in a similiar situation, he has a crappy gateway and a 6800 AGP and his power supply is giving him some issues and he does not like the choices for PS replacements, so I mentioned this would be a good future proof since the mobo is cheap and virtually expendable when he decides to go w/ pcie:

COOLER MASTER Centurion 5 CAC-T05-UB $45
Gigabyte GA-K8U-939 Socket 939 ULi M1689 $56
FSP Group (Fortron Source) AX450-PN 450W $51
AMD Athlon 64 3700+ San Diego 1GHz HT 1MB L2 Cache Socket 939 retail $212
G.SKILL Value Series 2GB (2 x 1GB) 184-Pin DDR400 2-3-2-5 $186 ($40 MIR)

For him it is a good deal since his benchmarks were below par and this should help greatly and he has a good base of parts to start off w/ and he can just drop-in upgrade a pci-e mobo/gpu around december...

So if you *really* don't want to replace the fan or do a cheap mod like I mentioned, this is the way to go and you can use your gpu & hdd's and CD drives in a new system.

As they say, if you want to waste your time gaming then you might as well join the culture and upgrade to something more modern. The case is Mictro ATX, but if it's anything like the 4500 case, the front usb and power switch run off their own little circuit board, and use a proprietary ribbon cable to attatch to the mobo. If that's the case then obviously your best bet is to start from scratch and sell off your Dell locally or on Ebay, because I seriously doubt your smart enough to modify the dell case to work.