Though I have to admit, that is a decent rig...much better than the one the other guy I spoke of has...the only issues I have with it is that it only sports one case fan and the PSU is a measly 350W.
At first glance, from experience, those are simply not enough. I am sure you will get decent performance for most desktop and low end games out of the machine, but I fear that if you really put the machine to the task, you may run into heat and stability issues. The video card on its own with plenty of fresh air flow around it can dissipate the heat well. I have a Sapphire variant to the card you have, mine uses a Vapour-X cooling solution on it that is reportedly the best in this series. That said, this is taking the assumption of decent air coming directly over the card. This ensures I am not getting any ambient air from inside the case which can be considerably warmed up by the hard disk, optical drive and onboard chipset. There is no mention of a second case fan aside from the rear unit, which is most likely an exhaust fan. If this machine had a lesser CPU, video and hard disk, I'd say that fan was enough for basic use, but beyond that, a second intake fan would be desirable. Preferably a third in your specific rig, one up front to add cool air for the hard disk, and one on the side panel to give air to the GPU and CPU directly.
I have 5 large fans on my rig, four 120mm fans in front, side and rear, a 180 on top. Also the PSU has two fans, though the PSU is bottom mounted and draws cool air from underneath the case and exhausts it out the back, so it is independent of the rest of the rig. The fans also have speed control fed from the mainboard to control how fast they spin when the machine is in use, I barely hear them. The CPU has a custom heatsink, a CN10S Flex that can be mounted without a fan in passive mode, but I have an additional 120mm fan on that to draw air through. This fan is also controlled digitally via temperature. The mainboard uses a passive heatpipe type heatsink (factory installed) that also cools the voltage regulators for the whole thing. 8Gb of 1600 DDR3 high performance ram, 6 hard drives in 3 RAID 0 configurations, one set using SATA 3 controller.
When all said and done, the CPU (AMD Phenom II 965 Quad 3.4Ghz OC'd to 4.1GHz) and system temperatures have never risen above 40C even under full load, the CPU is rated to 90C. The GPU runs considerably hotter under full load, roughly 65C or so.
All of that powered by an 850W PSU.
The PSU in your case kind of worries me about being adequate to the task for the GPU and CPU you have. I would have hoped that Dell stuck a 450-500W in there to feed the power demands of the two, along with the hard disk and mainboard. Reading elsewhere, you can put a RAID 0 disk pair in there apparently, that is a bonus, but I think you will most certainly risk system stability with the additional drive and heat inside the case. You may get away with the current setup for some time, but I highly recommend to clean the heat sink fins of dust every 6 months or so on the CPU and GPU...
At first glance, from experience, those are simply not enough. I am sure you will get decent performance for most desktop and low end games out of the machine, but I fear that if you really put the machine to the task, you may run into heat and stability issues. The video card on its own with plenty of fresh air flow around it can dissipate the heat well. I have a Sapphire variant to the card you have, mine uses a Vapour-X cooling solution on it that is reportedly the best in this series. That said, this is taking the assumption of decent air coming directly over the card. This ensures I am not getting any ambient air from inside the case which can be considerably warmed up by the hard disk, optical drive and onboard chipset. There is no mention of a second case fan aside from the rear unit, which is most likely an exhaust fan. If this machine had a lesser CPU, video and hard disk, I'd say that fan was enough for basic use, but beyond that, a second intake fan would be desirable. Preferably a third in your specific rig, one up front to add cool air for the hard disk, and one on the side panel to give air to the GPU and CPU directly.
I have 5 large fans on my rig, four 120mm fans in front, side and rear, a 180 on top. Also the PSU has two fans, though the PSU is bottom mounted and draws cool air from underneath the case and exhausts it out the back, so it is independent of the rest of the rig. The fans also have speed control fed from the mainboard to control how fast they spin when the machine is in use, I barely hear them. The CPU has a custom heatsink, a CN10S Flex that can be mounted without a fan in passive mode, but I have an additional 120mm fan on that to draw air through. This fan is also controlled digitally via temperature. The mainboard uses a passive heatpipe type heatsink (factory installed) that also cools the voltage regulators for the whole thing. 8Gb of 1600 DDR3 high performance ram, 6 hard drives in 3 RAID 0 configurations, one set using SATA 3 controller.
When all said and done, the CPU (AMD Phenom II 965 Quad 3.4Ghz OC'd to 4.1GHz) and system temperatures have never risen above 40C even under full load, the CPU is rated to 90C. The GPU runs considerably hotter under full load, roughly 65C or so.
All of that powered by an 850W PSU.
The PSU in your case kind of worries me about being adequate to the task for the GPU and CPU you have. I would have hoped that Dell stuck a 450-500W in there to feed the power demands of the two, along with the hard disk and mainboard. Reading elsewhere, you can put a RAID 0 disk pair in there apparently, that is a bonus, but I think you will most certainly risk system stability with the additional drive and heat inside the case. You may get away with the current setup for some time, but I highly recommend to clean the heat sink fins of dust every 6 months or so on the CPU and GPU...
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