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Dell legacy Inspiron 530 motherboard case swap to Lenovo Thinkcenter A60
Dell 530 has a characteristic silver minitower case. I have seen this model discarded in e trash or on sale for 10-15. seems the tech inside (core 2 duo) is too old for modern use. I have one in good condition, and I have a vacant Lenovo Thinkcenter A60 microATX case originally hosting Athlon 64x 2 cpu. It has a build in floppy disk drive. 530i happens to have a floppy disk socket too.
Reason why swap Dell into Lenovo case is
1. the case is currently empty not being used
2. the angular Lenovo case has a Saber tooth fierce appearing case as compared to the suave Dell case having smooth rounded edge, which better fits XP action games such as F.E.A.R. I plan to install.
Lenovo uses proprietary front panel 14-1 pin.
530 mobo front panel is standard 9 pin.
Align the Lenovo case pin 9-11 to Dell front panel 6-8. this will turn on Dell mobo.
(edited)
redxps630
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Posted August 22nd, 2026 17:29
case swap is successful. small downside is not to be able to connect PWR LED and front audio. front audio connector (orange) is proprietary and does not match Dell motherboard standard audio header.
front USB FRONT PANEL (yellow connector)
having the Lenovo floppy connected to Dell motherboard spares one from BIOS start up error of finding no floppy disk drive.
upgrade:
install discrete Creative X-Fi Xtreme audio PCI sound card and discrete video card HD5450 (1GB DDR3) which meets recommendation of F.E.A.R.
F.E.A.R recommended Graphics Card: Geforce 6000 or better.
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