Final post

This will be my final post here.  I have since moved on from my 760 machine in favor of something more modern and powerful.  It was fun while it lasted!  I will try to answer any new questions that come up.  Thanks for your interest and all the best!

Noctua NF-A8 installed

The fan has been successfully installed.  I used the mounting rubbers from the original case fan.  Not sure what my temps are right now, but at least it hasn't blown up yet.  The only minor issue I had is that the connection between the fan and the adapter cable was not totally secure, but it's not going anywhere so I'm not too worried about it.  I could probably tape it together and call it a day.

Case fan replacement

It's been a while since I've updated here.  Here's what's new.

I've decided to upgrade the case fan since I find it to be a little noisy at times.  I'm going to go with the newly released Noctua NF-A8 fan.  This is a 80x80x25mm fan.  The fan that comes included with the Optiplex 760 SFF measures at 80x80x38mm, so I'm hoping that I won't have any problems mounting it.  My goal is to have a more silent fan while still being able to push enough air to cool the CPU.  Notcua fans are known for their performance, silent, and reliability.  I hope I've hit the mark here.

Noctua NF-A8

One other thing to mention is that this is a PWM fan, which means that it has a 4 pin connector.  The Dell motherboard has a proprietary 5 pin connector, so this fan is not going to work out of the box.  I've also ordered an adapter cable, model number CB-PWM-D5.

Idle temperature

Guts pics

Here's another shot of the inside of the case.  You can see the Sapphire card in place on the right (I wish there were more space between it and the hard drive caddy, but temps never seem to go beyond 69F under load, so I'm ok), the 2 hard drives in place in the standard Dell hard drive caddy (used the Scythe brackets, worked out nicely and there is even about 0.25" space between the 2 drives) as well as the various adapters I used to make it all work.

Forgot to mention

I forgot to mention, I used an adapter to plug the second hard drive in using the slimline power provided by the Optiplex PSU.  Just unplug the SATA/power from the optical drive, plug it into this adapter, and plug the other end into your hard drive as usual.  That way, all cables are in use inside the case, nothing's left hanging ;) 


Here's what it looks like:

Slimline 13 pin SATA Male to 22 Pin SATA Female Cable Adapter

Up and running

I only ran into one issue with this install.  I was unable to boot from the slim DVD drive while connected to the internal USB.  I had to disconnect the second hard drive and re-attach the DVD drive to sata1, install, then re-attach the second hard drive once I was done.  All 3 drives are up and running now in Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit!  Video card installed no problem, drivers are up date as of yesterday's release from AMD.


Here's my WEI score.  Because of the SSD, my bottleneck right now is the CPU.  Without a higher end CPU, this is pretty much as fast as this machine can get at this time.  Not bad, little Optiplex! =)