XPS 8700 nVidia GTX video card upgrades,

very nice post a pic of this beast :)

granterb, that's an outright piece of art you have there, truly astonishing! 

You should be working for Dell :-)

Must have very good hand control, no way could I have done the same, even with the same components. Out of curiosity, do you have the max of 32GB (64GB if XPS 8900  with DDR4 RAM)? Being that RAM, even DDR4, is at very good pricing (though not at that of 2011), it's a great time to consider a max out. 

The only mistake I made in that regard, was that I stuffed my XPS 8900 with 32GB, yet should have seen if I could have lowered the timings to like 9-9-9-27 or so. May have made my RAM score boost to 7.9, as it turned out, there was no increase going from 24 to 32GB. Yet I still have it for virtual machines or whatever requires lots of RAM. 

Going back to your picture, all I can say is WOW!

Happy Gaming!

Cat

@GRANTERB - looks great. I'm happy to see a post with a pic of that PSU in an 8700. It is a touch longer but it shows it can fit.

Thanks!  Went with the 32gigs of Ram as I originally bought the rig for Photoshop and Premiere, then later got into gaming again. =)

Thanks!  Its actually an XPS 8500 as well.  It was an extremely tight fit but I can say it def works!  I searched high and low for months trying to see what would work in there, and was unable to find anyone trying to throw in this size of power supply and graphics card, so decided to just go for it.

Most were talking about 8700 or 8900's, with negative comments saying itd prob fail due to airflow alone, so I was def wondering if I was crazy LOL.

I haven't seen an 8900 first hand but I have both 8700 and 8500s and the cases are essentially identical.

You might consider adding a front intake fan.

The 8700 case will take a 92mm without any mods and with a little work I think I can get a 120 or a 140MM to fit.

I had considered that but after reading a lot of posts most said it made little to no difference, so I never pursued it further.  I havn't even heard this beast of a video card make any noise even under heavy 4k gaming.  I've manually set the fan to 100% just to be sure it works, but otherwise its whisper quite and cool. =)

Adding extra fans is money wasted imo. Since I've added an MSI GTX 980 in February 2015, the temperature never went above 69c for the card and I almost game exclusively on AAA titles. Every title I own are all set on Ultra for the graphic option. I have a 2013 8700 model the Special Edition one with 32GB of ram. This machine is a beast for the money and even Batman Arkham Knight runs smooth with all settings on extra so it says a lot about this machine.

Agree with Wowsers55 that the graphics cards can hold their own.

But, when the graphics card is at 70C, it is like a heating element in the case, and the case doesn't exhaust very well.

PSUs don't run as well when internal case temps are hot.
CPU coolers have to work harder when internal case temps are hot.
Perhaps the most concerning to me is hard disks fail faster when they get hot and since on the 8500/8700 there is no fan blowing across them .

In march I'm going to transplant one of our 8700s to a new case, and then mod the original 8700 case to see if I can easily add two 120mm intake fans. I have the fans sitting around and they are cheap anyway so it will be an interesting experiment. 

i agree with wowser no need and yes you can play AAA games on ultra but only on 1080p wich is nice but im actually upgrading now im building myself a custom X99 setup i want to get as close as possible to 4K by next year so im building the whole thing except im not upgrading GPU yet ill keep my Gtx 980 till Nvidea get theire new killer cards out this year then ill either buy 2 or 3 fo sli so all this to let you guys know that mine might be up for sale soon on the cheap only without the gpu though anyways happy gaming to ya all

For those of us here that was around when the XPS 8700 did not work with the GTX 9XX series, getting a bios update was like pulling teeth and for awhile there it looked like Dell was not gonna make it happen.

So this is probably a bit too early to speculate, but is anyone else not looking forward to see how they handle support for Pascal? Will we have to go through the whole song and dance again?

  Dan,

Adding a fan seems straight forward enough...or so I thought.  I popped the front bezel off and, well, I don't see how the fan secures  to the case. Did you cut some of the front perforated grill out of the way to allow for further air flow?   

I did not do any cutting. The fan is on the inside of the case.

I removed the drive bay, and relocated the HDD to the spot under the second 5 1/4 inch bay. 

It wasn't obvious that a fan would mount here but it did. I think there might have been a sticker over one of the holes.