I bought my Dell Dimension XPS Gen 3 in August of 2004. This past January, I had some troubles with my PC. At the conclusion of my 12-page thread my PC was dead, as well as my logitech wireless keyboard and mouse.

A couple of weeks ago I put a WD Caviar hard drive in my PC, and miraculously it came back to life. In the months in between, I took my PC apart. The CPU was out of the box for maybe 3 of those months.



In examining my HSF setup I noticed something strange. Before I tell about that, I have to write up what CPU cooling system I have. The Heatsink sits on top of the CPU with a plastic shroud on top of that. In the orientation of the case standing upright, it has two 120mm fans to the left of the Heatsink:






The top fan blows air from the HSF out of the PC. The bottom fan sucks air onto the heatsink. Now, I don't know if that makes thermal sense at all? Wouldn't the two fans just fight each other?

The strange thing that I found was a black piece of plastic in the duct by the top fan. It completely blocked off the fan from the rest of the HSF. Obviously, this seems very wrong. I took out the piece of plastic, it was stuck in there by its sticky edges.

Does this setup make any sense? Should I change the orientation of the fans?

Is that one of the BTX based XPS's or does it use ATX? I can't really tell by the picture, but I'm guessing ATX. If the two fans in the rear are set to exhaust heat, then there really shouldn't be any thermal issues. I guess. :?

Its not BTX, but not ATX either. Its quite proprietary. It has 6 expansion slots as opposed to ATX's 7 and mATX's 4. The PSU is in a separate section, taking up the whole bottom of the case.

Does it make sense, or should I reverse one of the fans?

Umm, what are the temps and what is the processor?

yea, but did Dell mean for that piece of plastic to be there? It was there for 2.5yrs. It completely isolated the top fan.

the CPU is a Pentium 4 540 Prescott w/ Heatburst.

Ill check temps now. What should I use, Speedfan?

That and Intel's TAT (you can download it here) as well as CoreTemp so we can get the best readings.

I can only get load temps now. Im streaming a movie in Firefox, and for some reason its taking up ~30-50% of my CPU cycles. Ill encode video and get it up to 100%.

Give me a couple min

*EDIT* Coretemp wont run since its not a Core CPU

Speedfan only gives me the temps for my Hard Drive

TAT says I have an invalid processor


What now?

I'm at a loss...

But what about that piece of plastic covering the top fan?

I say leave it all alone. Its probably there to direct airflow.

Dude, it was completely blocking the airflow of the top fan. I took it out weeks ago.

It was just a piece of plastic with sticky edges stuck in the green duct

I read somewhere that that piece of plastic is to cool the Capacitors below the processor, however i removed that piece of plastic long ago. Even later I modded a zalman 9500 onto the xps because the stock cooling was crap. Ill post pics

*Shrugs*

Its a Dell. What can I say.

The overall quality isnt that bad. Look at that wiring!

I ripped it all out and put it back, so you cant really tell, but all of the psu cables were tied up and clipped to the mobo plate. Great stuff

Take mpilch's advice and just leave it alone; it's probably a vacuum or something like that.

Whatever it is, there's a reason for it. Your PC ran fine for nearly 2 1/2 years and it wasn't your CPU that caused it to die, it was your hard drive.

If it worked before and you haven't done anything drastic, it will work now. Dell's engineers are paid to make sure that people don't send their computers back with CPU's that melted at stock speeds.

it's a dell, i would probably would have left it alone. That piece is there for a reason.