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! =)

RAM upgrade

Nothing too exciting here, upgraded from 4GB to 8GB.  Strangely enough, Windows see all 8GB, although only 2.96GB are usable.  When I had 4GB in there, I think it said 3.25GB were available.  Strange.  In any case, Windows 7 64bit is coming soon so all that RAM will be usable soon enough! 

Optical drive arrangement

The Optiplex 760 comes with a slimline optical drive that looks like this:

My plan is to have this working as well as 2 hard drives.  The Optiplex 760 only comes with 2 SATA ports, one of which is occupied by this drive.  However, I discovered that there is an internal USB connector on the motherboard of this model, seen as point 11 below:

I bought a slimline SATA to USB adapter, and along with another USB adapter I had sitting around from a project long-abandoned, I hooked them up and connected them to the motherboard:

Fired up the machine and...it didn't work.  I re-seated the plug and it booted but then I didn't have a picture on my monitor when I got into Windows.  I thought it might still be loose, so I re-seated both ends again, and voila, booted up fine and the optical drive is now recognized as a removable CD drive.  Cool!