I recently purchased a Dell Precision 3640, which I have configured on the Dell homepage myself.

For the cooling system (front fan) there were 4 different configurations options. (No front fan, 120 mm front fan, 92 mm front fan, 92 mm front fan and Y-cable).

I chosed the option 120 mm front fan, what in retrospect was the wrong decision because this front fan is quite noisy.

Because Dell offers the option without front fan, it seems that it isn't mandatory to have a front fan in this system.

In a test I unplugged the front fan and then the fan noise disappeared completely. The other fans of the CPU, graphic adapter and powersupply were almost not hearable.

But unfortunately I got I BIOS message at boot time, that the front fan wasn't working what obviously is true. But I did not found a configuration option in the BIOS to tell the motherboard that the front fan isn't present.

The question now is, if it is possible to configure my workstation in the field to the configuration without front fan, which is also a legal configuration by Dell because they offer it at the configuration page.