The front fan only spins if a high-power AGP card is installed.  It is located in the PCI/AGP card area and is just for cooling that area.  It has nothing to do with the HD temp.  Do you think that the hard drive is actually getting too hot?  If you think the sensor is the problem, just try moving the hard drive to a different mounting location.  (The sensor is located only at the HDD-1 position.)

ntheno

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ntheno wrote: (The sensor is located only at the HDD-1 position.)

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Do you know if this is true for the Precision 650 as well? Is there a way to find out the limit temperature, which triggers the warnings?

Thanks

The Precision 650 does not have a temp monitoring mechanism specifically for the hard drive, so you should not encounter the same problem with it.

Lab Rat

Thank you Lab Rat. I assume that applies to the Precision 450 as well, since it's rather similar to the 650...

Hope you got your problem worked out. If you did, could you let us know if it did turn out to be the the HDD temp sensor? I've wondered about the front fan on my 420, as it does spin up at start up, and then stop. The post from ntheno about only the fan only working with an AGP Pro card makes sense, but the airflow is first directed through the HDD cage.

Steve

 

I haven't made any changes to my computer, but for some reason it's working most of the time now. It only auto-shutdown once in the past week. I don't know what caused it. Of course the fan is still inactive. But if the random shutdown problem should occur consistantly again, I'll try moving the HD around.

The problem came back to haunt me again.

So I changed the harddrive docking location, but to my surprise, the system still shuts down right after it finishes booting.

I even moved the whole harddrive docking cage out of the case, the problem still happens.

I am starting to wonder if there's a virus at work here.

Any help?

I am having serious temperature problems. I could use some help too. The box is in a well-ventilated area in a room that is about 68 degrees. It locks up constantly such that I have to pull the power cord out and put it back in. I hear that loud fan only for a second or so when I turn the computer on after a lockup not during a normal start, and all diagnostics I have run give me temperature warnings. Could anyone give me some suggestions? I hope I've given enough info below. Thanks.

 

Precision 650

2 2.4 GHz Xeons

nVidia 128MB Ti4200 AGP8x

Audigy 2 sound card

2 80GB hard drives

Update:
I spent few hours on the phone with Dell's tech support. We couldn't fix it, but narrow the problem to the motherboard by removing or reseating other parts.
Anyway, they sent a service guy to replace the motherboard. Now everything is nice and dandy.

What is the exact trigger that would get this front fan going? What kind of high powered AGP card?

Is there some other way to turn it on? Is there a separate temp sensor for that too? Thanks.