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January 14th, 2018 13:00
XPS 8930, How I Fixed the Noise Issues
I recently bought a Dell XPS 8930 with an i7-8700 (not 8700k). When the CPU is under heavy load (i.e. around 100%) the case fan and the CPU cooler fan really ramp up and are very loud. When under heavy load the XPS 8930 is the noisiest computer that I have ever used. When you are not stressing the CPU though, it is pretty quiet.
I have found two solutions to this issue:
(1) Replace the CPU cooler with a more effective one - not easy but very effective
To me it seemed that the stock CPU cooler - which is quite a small unit - was struggling to keep the CPU cool when the CPU was running at 100%. The CPU temperature when at 100% for a period of time was typically in the high 80's Centigrade and peaked in the low 90's. The issue with the Dell case design is that there is only around 70mm of space from the top of the CPU to the side of the PSU. The stock CPU cooler and fan is 50mm high and has an 80mm wide fan. There are not many CPU coolers that will fit within 70mm and still have space for airflow. For example, one of the best "low profile" CPU coolers is the Raijintek Pallas. However, this is 68mm high. I wasn't confident that the fan would work very well if it had a flat surface just a couple of millimeters above it. In the end the fan that I found that did fit and was effective was a Scythe Big Shuriken 2.
This unit is 58mm high including the fan - so still has 12mm/ half an inch of clearance. This CPU cooler is much larger with a 120mm fan vs the 80mm fan of the stock cooler. (So the surface area of the fan and heat sink cooler is more than twice that of the stock cooler.) The design also ensures that the heatsink clears the capacitors/resisters and memory banks that are close to the CPU. This CPU cooler doesn't seem to have to work very hard to keep the CPU cool even when the CPU usage is 100%. Under load my maximum CPU temperatures are about 5C lower than they were before and the fan noise from the Big Shuriken 2 is very low. Keeping the CPU cooler seems to mean that the case fan doesn't have to ramp up as much so that is much quieter too. I notice that the Big Shuriken also seems to have extra cooling capacity. Occasionally when the temperatures are high you will hear the CPU cooler fan ramping up a bit (though still much quieter than the stock cooler) and in a few seconds the temperature will fall from being in the 80's to being in the 60's and the CPU fan will slow down again. The stock cooler on the other hand simply seems to have to work at 100% all the time when the CPU is under load.
Changing the CPU Cooler isn't for the faint hearted.
Socket Clamp Backplate Issue - The CPU is held in place with a socket clamp - normally this screws into a backplate on the underside of the motherboard like this - it is the plate with three screws in it.
All CPU coolers are held in place with another back plate that also fits under the motherboard and usually goes over the top of the CPU socket backplate. This is what the screws from the CPU cooler fit into. Motherboards have holes for these screws to pass through.
Unfortunately Dell use a single back plate that has screw holes for both the CPU socket clamp and the heat sink. This is unusual and stops you using the back plate that comes with the CPU cooler.
You can replace the Dell combined backplate with a normal CPU socket clamp bacck plate and then use the CPU cooler backplate. This is what I did - I bought a brocken 1151 motherboard for £15 and took the (normal) socket clamp back plate off of that. (I could not find anywhere that sold just a socket clamp back plate - or even a whole socket clamp assembly.
Alternatively you could try resusing the Dell combined backlate instead of the CPU cooler backplate. However, I found that the existing screw holes in the dell back plate where the stock CPU cooler screws into were too small. You can get around this by knocking the screw holes out of the backplate with a hole punch but i didnt want to do that.
So for me step 1 was to get a socket 1151 CPU clamp backplate.
Then you can unplug everything from the motherboard. Before you do this take a few pictures of all the cables in place just in case you cnanot remember where they go.
Remove the screws holding in the motherboard (7 of these I think) and remove the motherboard from the case. This is a pain because the case has absolutely no spare space around the motherboard and you have to get it to an angle to get it out so that the USB sockets etc dont catch on the case. I really wish that Dell had made the case just a quarter of an inch bigger all the way around the motherboard.
Take off the existing CPU cooler and the socket clamp so that you can remove Dell's combined back plate. Put the CPU somewhere safe. Put the socket clamp back on using your new socket backplate. Put the CPU back in. Then fit the new CPU cooler - making sure that you clean off the old thermal paste and use some new good quality paste. It really helps if you have a spare set of hands while attaching the CPU cooler - it would be really hard to hold the cooler in place on the CPU and screw it into place from the underside of the motherboard otherwise.
Then put it all back together and you should have a nice and quiet PC.
I did have one moment of panic after I put it all back together - as the system would not power up! I could not see any cables that were not back in the right place. Going back tothe photos showed me that I had missed a small cable that appeared to be for the power button. It had been pushed out of the way when trying to get the motherboard back in the case and was small enough to be hidden by other cables.
(2) Reduce the Maximum CPU frequency - easy to do and effective
More details on this option are here:
Reducing CPU Maximum Frequency
Personally I found that a setting of 3900MHz made the XPS 8930 pretty quiet while having no significant impact on performance. In practice this isn't very surprising. In theory the i7-8700 can go up to 4600MHz with Turbo Boost. However, with longer running tasks the maximum CPU frequency rarely goes above 4000MHz.
Some people have recommended reducing the CPU Maximum State (in power settings) instead. Do NOT do this. If you set this to even 99% you will lose about 25% of your maximum CPU performance. I tested ripping a 2 minute section of a blu-ray. With Max CPU State at 100% it took 60 seconds - with a setting of 99% it took 76 seconds. This big change in performance is because even a setting of 99% disables all turbo boosting of the CPU so the maximum CPU frequency falls from 4.6GHz to 3.2GHz. On the plus side though - if you are willing to take this significant hit in performance then your PC will be very quiet.
aleg123
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29 Posts
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July 22nd, 2018 01:00
Check out my post on the ARCTIC Freezer 11 LP CPU cooler.
It accepts stock M3 screws without having to switch the stock backplate.
XPS 8930, i7-8700, 3rd party CPU cooler
546insp
2 Intern
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732 Posts
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July 22nd, 2018 07:00
Those front fans have a huge space in front of them so there is 10 times the area to make a hot air U-turn compared to the vents farther up. I have used thick weather-striping to quiet hard drives and they were hard to remove. Worse case is that you have to put them back but that won't happen anyway. Pics & post coming up...………..
AB111
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July 22nd, 2018 08:00
From your experience with the front fan do you think there will be enough room to put a watercooling system for the cpu?
HanoverB
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798 Posts
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July 22nd, 2018 09:00
Do you know anything about what "creating airflow" means?
HanoverB
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798 Posts
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July 22nd, 2018 09:00
Start a thread on "XPS 8930, i7 8700, CPU Liquid Cooling Options?" to begin that discussion.
Edit: I did eventually start one
https://www.dell.com/community/XPS-Desktops/XPS-8930-CPU-Liquid-Cooler-GTX-1080-Hybrid-GPU-Upgrades/td-p/6137280
MikeSuamri
1 Message
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July 27th, 2018 07:00
@ghooper, in your 8930, before you removed the CPU fan, did you have the blower and heat-sink assembly, or a simple fan? I have the 8930 and it has the blower and heat sink assembly and I'm considering installing a Noctua NH-L9i low-profile cooler (it is only 37mm tall with fan). While the blower and fan are noisy, I don't want to replace them with something that will cool less.
The blower/fan can be seen on page 85 of the 8930 service manual.
I'd also like to replace the top fan with something quieter. Any suggestions? I haven't measured the dimensions of that one yet.
P.S. I run BOINC clients, so the CPU and GPU both run a lot so the noise is common. To help, there's a utility called TThrottle which can be used to throttle the CPU and GPU. It doesn't require BOINC to be run, but is made to do so. It works on temperature ranges so you can set ranges on the CPU and GPU to keep them in a safe range. Case in point, even though my fans and blower are going loud, this tool helps me know that the temps inside my cores and GPU are still in a safe range. So at this point it's simply about noise reduction, not worrying about burning out the chips.
546insp
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732 Posts
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July 27th, 2018 09:00
Hanover;
Yes, that's why my new front fan installation is a complete success. Those 2 front fans are pulling in zero outside air and just blowing hot air around.
546insp
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732 Posts
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July 28th, 2018 07:00
Hanover said: Do you know anything about what "creating airflow" means?
Do you know anything about being rude ?
OlderGamer
1 Message
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August 3rd, 2018 09:00
Great topic and well explained.
I did all that ghooper suggested including fitting a Cryorig C7 and I obviously ran into the CPU backplate issue.
My solution was to throw the cpu bracket OUT and to install the C7 as cpu bracket with the Cryorig backplate installed. So I do not have a cpu bracket anymore, the processor is held in place by the C7 cooler.
All seems to work fine, cooling is better and noise is much better.
Official iGamer
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5 Posts
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August 4th, 2018 19:00
Great post man!
I had the same issue but my solution was wayyy simpler, Whoever built mine to order left a slim piece of plastic between the cooler and the cpu, but it was just enough to disrupt the cooling capacity of the heatsink, I removed the piece of plastic, and fans have been happy and "chill" ever since!
HanoverB
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798 Posts
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August 20th, 2018 04:00
I was able to get acceptable temps and noise levels from CPU liquid cooling a XPS 8930 w/ i7 8700 CPU:
***Prime 95 v2.66 CPU Torture Test, Small FFT, 12 cycles. 60 minutes:
CPU temps during test runs was 66-70C. Max temp was 75C (Boost)
Thermal throttling: NO
Clock speeds stable at ~3492 mHz, max was 4490 mHz. (Boost)
Voltage stable at 1.022, max was 1.3.
Upper Intake Fan (CPU FAN header) for CPU cooler max RPM 1078 (Boost)
Lower Intake fan (TOP FAN header) for GPU cooler max RPM 1019
Upper exhaust fan fixed at 1500 RPM.
The noisiest fan in the system is the liquid cooled GTX 1080 onboard fan at load on a 3D Mark Firestrike Test.
CPU Temps during test max temp was 75C.
Thermal throttling: NO
Clock speeds max was 4388 mHz.
Voltage max was 1.31.
Upper Intake Fan (CPU FAN) for CPU cooler max RPM 906
Lower Intake fan (TOP FAN) for GPU cooler max RPM 869
Upper exhaust fan fixed at 1500 RPM.
GPU Temps: Max was 79C,
GPU Fan speed, 1100 RPM at rest, max RPM 2822
GPU Clock max at 1961 mHz
The upper exhaust fan fixed at 1500 is overkill as the temps in the case never budged the fans on the headers and will be replaced by a quieter fan configured to run around 1000 RPM. Need to tweak the GPU cooler to get better temps as well to quiet the GPU fan and better temps.
https://www.dell.com/community/XPS-Desktops/XPS-8930-CPU-Liquid-Cooler-GTX-1080-Hybrid-GPU-Upgrades/m-p/6137280#M16363
Jacobong521
16 Posts
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February 15th, 2019 01:00
hi i got question to ask
1. how did mount the front top and bottom fan? did you screw these or just simply put it there?
2. is it really useful to change the dell stock cpu fan to noctua fan? in term of temperature i mean.
HanoverB
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798 Posts
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February 15th, 2019 08:00
Go here
https://www.dell.com/community/XPS-Desktops/XPS-8930-possible-to-install-a-front-case-fan/td-p/5894027
https://www.dell.com/community/XPS-Desktops/XPS-8930-installing-new-3rd-party-fans/m-p/7238069
546insp
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732 Posts
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February 16th, 2019 09:00
AlienBlaster
20 Posts
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February 16th, 2019 11:00
Reading this, I see what the problem is. You are using the "wrong" Y-cables or sometimes "wrong" fans (e.g. the Noctua PWM ones). All your fans are working in the minimum state (about 300 rpms for Noctua) until temps reach 80-90c so you don't see much gain for idle or medium usage. The little gain you see is from bigger and better radiators on the aftermarket coolers.
You will need to use a 3-pin Y-cable (linked below) instead of a 4-pin Y-cable such as NA-YC1, or something similar to connect your PWM fans. The point is to block the PWM signal while still being able to send the Tach signal to avoid start-up errors.
Some more info here:
https://www.dell.com/community/XPS-Desktops/XPS-8930-CPU-Liquid-Cooler-GTX-1080-Hybrid-GPU-Upgrades/m-p/7243546/highlight/true#M22292
For most out there, the solution could be the following simple route:
1. Buy the Noctua NF-S12A FLX 120mm 3-pin fan to replace the top fan. Plug it directly to the motherboard case top fan header.
2. Buy a 3-pin Y cable like this
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812423168
and connect it to the CPU fan header on the motherboard. Use one (or even two linked together) of the supplied Low Noise Adapters coming with NF-S12A to manually set the CPU fan speed to your acceptable noise level with as much RPM as possible, and then connect it to the CPU fan. The stock CPU fan can be loud at full speed, but with the two adapters you can adjust up to 4 different RPMs. Try them to get a taste. You don't really need to buy the Y-cable if you are willing to cut the side of the adapter header so you can plug in the stock 4-pin CPU fan. But hey, it's just two dollars.
The 120mm fan running full speed is rated 63 CFM and should be sufficient for most people. The noise level is 17.8 dB which means it is fairly quiet too. The CPU fan just needs to keep up with the speed to reach a balance for disposing heat. This way you bypass both the cpu and case fan curves and can keep the case cool and quiet (relatively) at all time. Total cost is around 20 dollars and no modding is needed.
Certainly if you are very sensitive to noise, or you have work load beyond what a 63 CFM air flow fan can handle, you will need to go one step further but I doubt many will need to.