want to liquid cool my dell

[giejack]

I have a dell computer that is running too hot. I would like to know if anyone can recommend a cooling system or help me build one. my specs are as followed

CPU intel cor I7 950@3.07 ghz bloomfield 45nm tech

motherboard dell 0x501h

graphic card 1792mb NVidia GeForce gtx260

any help would be great thanks

[AMDforME]

How hot is too hot and why not just use a better heatsink/fan ?

[Scubar]

Buy a better case?

[giejack]

cpu in idle is 55-60 with load 85-90

graphics card is 50-55 with load 90ish

I would go with an air cool I haven't seen any that would be an upgrade for the graphics card

[Sparky]

The problem I see is that case is probably not going to support water cooling, some Dells have proprietary front panel connections and/or heatsink mounts so you can't easily move the board to another case half the time, etc...

Not sure how best you'll do it.

[giejack]

if I was to take some pic of the inside of my case would that help. the case is a mid size case there seems to be a good amount of room in there

[El Mano]

Changing the case would be the sensible solution.

The fun and cool solution though would be to mod the case. If you are interested in this, please post pictures of the case, both opened and closed. The more the better.

[yojimbo197]

Following up on AMDfor ME's suggestion, if you are using the stock heatsink that came with the Dell, you probably have either a crappy heatsink and/or too much/not enough thermal paste on it(Assuming that you have cleaned your exhaust fan and heatsink fan). Both occurred in my Dell i5 rig. Just applying some Arctic Silver 5 helped lower the CPU temps a good 5oC. But what really helped was getting a better heatsink. I bought a Zalman 9500AT2. That lowered my temps at 100% load a good 15-20oC per core. There are plenty of other good air coolers out there, including the Cooler Master Hyper 212 and Noctua's. The problem you may face is the width/depth of the case. I would have loved to have put a Hyper212 in my case, but it was too dang tall.The Zalman in fact, just fits. by about .5-1 inch. The other thing you can try doing is leaving the side panel of the case off when you are running full bore. Some people will drape air conditioning filters over the open side to prevent dust from getting in.

The problem with moving the Dell board, and I know this from experience, is that they usually have proprietary on/off and reset buttons, card readers, and audio connections with the mobo that may not work in a new case. Also the Dell BIOS, at least on my rig seems to be locked, so the fan speeds stay at whatever they specified for the case and heatsink fans.

[giejack]

the dementions of the case are 17h 7w 19 deep
I will try and download pic tomorrow

[Agent11]

How many free 5 1/2 bays do you have?