Dell T1700 Project

The year has shown a resurgence for me of desktop computing, and the T1700 is the project of the moment. The core of the build is a Dell precision T1700 motherboard from a workstation, bought from eBay for $60 including a few other essential items I will discuss later. The motherboard had no cpu (because it is more lucrative for sellers to split systems) so I bought an i5-4570 quad core processor for $70 which, according to the Dell technical manual, is compatible with their LGA 1150 mobo.

Black Friday arrived and I picked up a mATX case from Amazon, $30 and there were also a couple of unique items I needed for the build winging their way from various sources.

When all parts arrived, the first stage was to replace the cheap 3-pin fan from the back of the case with a genuine Dell fan from an "ancient" GX620 system :

The Dell fan has been attached with it's original rubber mounts, they work to isolate the fan noise, tricky little items through, so a simple attachment to the case took about ten minutes. The 80mm Rosewill fan will be repurposed at some point.

This is a good moment to state why I needed to do that, and it's not only that the Dell fan is a better unit, but also, the motherboard has a sensor for the rear case fan and the connection is 5 pin, not the 3 of the generic Rosewill fan, so installing a Dell fan will give compatibility and one less error message when booting the machine.

The next step was to install a 120mm front fan, which took a few minutes via 4 screws. The Antec fan has a switch so that it can run at various speeds and it will be powered via a 4 pin molex connector from the main power supply.