I just recently tore apart my old 2005 Dell. I found a weird part in front of the fan. Could someone tell me what it is?
Pics:
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Probably some sort of heatsink
Read a little more on computers bud. You should know from the heat transfer paste on it that it is obviously a heat sink/cooler designed to cool down your CPU (the HTP is used to increase conductivity of heat from the CPU into the heat sink)
Haha I hope you didn't turn on your computer without putting that back. If you did, then I hope you've got a fire extinguisher handy.
The old 2005 dells used some weird kind of air flow channel that usually vented to the front or back grill to get air to the CPU. That's what pic 3 is. The rest are parts of the heat sink.
[QUOTE=macman2212;34467629]The old 2005 dells used some weird kind of air flow channel that usually vented to the front or back grill to get air to the CPU. That's what pic 3 is. The rest are parts of the heat sink.[/QUOTE]
Dell was an early adopter of the failed BTX form factor, which many of the higher end Pentium 4 machines Dell released used, including that one.
BTX was solely designed to help with the extreme heat and power consumption of the highest clocked Pentium 4 CPUs. The idea was to put the CPU in the middle of the motherboard towards the front, and have the north bridge behind it, so both could be cooled with a large fan.
The BTX design fixed most of the heat and power problems, but it ran into other issues. The trace lengths required for such a layout were ridiculously long (probably four times as long as on an ATX board) and made engineering a board that didn't have bus glitches from crosstalk a nightmare. If you compare an ATX board to a BTX board, you'll notice that the RAM slots are much farther away from the CPU and north bridge.
BTX ultimately failed in the marketplace because the reason for which it was designed disappeared when Intel dropped the entire Pentium 4 line and switched back to the Pentium M (core) architecture. Some companies still make BTX boards today, but in very limited quantities and usually to be proprietary so nobody else can reuse their parts.
[QUOTE=macman2212;34467629]The old 2005 dells used some weird kind of air flow channel that usually vented to the front or back grill to get air to the CPU. That's what pic 3 is. The rest are parts of the heat sink.[/QUOTE]
My 07 Dell had that on it as well.
thanks guys! as it turns out, i can't use it on my computer i'm building :(
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