XPS 8940, Better 3rd party cooler

SteveK318 no worries, quite the scare.

My 8940 started up the other day, was prompted for new Nvidia video drivers, ran the install and hung at the "Press OK to continue".  I tried to wait it out but opted to go with the middle finger salute (middle finger on power button for 10 seconds).  I waited 2 minutes and powered back on.  Windows promptly gave an error and suggested a recovery disk.  Uh oh!  Another restart and everything was fine.

All this talk about @SteveK318 not closing his front panel properly, @LikeHerdingCats 's front case panel being solid plastic and @Jon-62 's picture with the filters got me thinking... what if I found a way to completely eliminate the front panel on my G5 and just have a massive filter in place with only a frame around it to also cover the I/O ports and hold the power button. Easy to clean, super "breathable". The only thing I'd miss out on is the LED strip that I never turn on anyway.

Something to think about... 

@LikeHerdingCats - yeah, it's a bit freaky ! Even though I know I'm not going to lose any data or anything and I can always put the good parts together in another case, it is an awful feeling when it won't boot up !  Glad yours finally came around too !!

-- Steve

... with better ventilation .. and somewhere to mount two 200mm fans on the front!

@bertro514 - I like it - great idea !! I think I suggested to @LikeHerdingCats to 3D print a new cover with better ventilation!! My led light is either off or so dim I can't see it at all... which is just the way I like it !

-- Steve

@LikeHerdingCats - yeah, same with G5 ... it's on the back.

White light blinks though symbol in red circle...

And the LED that @bertro514 & I were referring to is this LED bar across the front of the G5. Something they put there for the 20 yr old kids who can't deal with quiet and calm !!

-- Steve

I just ordered two 360mm by 120mm magnetic filters on amazon and will get rid of the front cover. I'll post pics. It'll be ugly, but much easier to clean the dust off the filter as well as hopefully even better airflow.

Today, I removed the side panel and got a 10+ degree improvement in GPU temps under load!!! From 65-66 to 54-55. It's way more than I was expecting. Just goes to show how restrictive this case is. I don't want to keep it off long-term because of dust, but I'm already thinking of alternate approaches (i.e. a giant filter to cover the whole side, lol). 

@SteveK318  I don’t know about the G5 but I just noticed the hard drive access LED (or SSD) is on the back of the PC case.  I don’t know why they didn’t put that out front. 

Updated the XPS 8940 with VRMS heatsinks, additional 24GB of ram, a SSD drive and a HD. The fan from the stock CPU heatsink was mounted to the back as a secondary exhaust fan.

@btwo - nice, but where's your graphics card ?

@SteveK318 He could have pulled it out and sold it.  Alot of people are doing that now. 

@bertro514 - I like !!

I’d like to see him run the same benchmarks I ran (3D Mark, Cinebench) and the before/after. 

As “neat” as liquid cooling is, in every video I’ve seen where it compares air vs water, air wins by a big margin

I assume he has a non-F CPU with an integrated GPU, and uses the motherboard HDMI port for display.

@studmonkey77 - maybe so, but he has no place to put one since he put a fan in it's place !!