I am putting my dell machine into a new antec case as the GPU is always overheating in the original Dell box since I put in a new radeon 3850 graphics card. I have managed around all of Dells oddeties and gotten the MB mounted. Now I just need to know where to connect the leads from the case for Power switch, HDD LED and Power LED. Naturally Dell is keeping this a secret. If anyone can tell me which of the pins are for what I would be really grateful.
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I have migrated custom computers into standard cases for people, and for some, there is no easy solution. I have looked at the documentation for your computer at
http://support.dell.com/su
and saw the front I/O panel at
http://support.dell.com/su
You're going to need to see where the wires go from the switch and LED cables to that little circuit board in the original case. I would use a continuity tester to be sure, considering the way they have everything crammed together over the ribbon cables. You may end up doing what I do with Dells, which is pulling apart the ribbon cable and solder up a custom header connector to the board itself. With a fine point soldering iron, it's not too difficult. Connectors are even a good place to learn to solder because you don't have to worry about overheating a transistor and killing a board. You can add headers to the little board. The male breakaway headers I recommend can be seen at the bottom of this page about building robots:
http://www.societyofrobots
A shot of how this could look is this image:
http://projects.gbdt.com.a
It doesn't have to be pretty. It might be easier to find a standard motherboard that is compatible with the processor, memory and cards and replace the mobo by itself. I had to do that with a GW machine that I worked on a while ago.
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by: PUNKYPosted on 2008-11-14 at 20:17:03ID: 22965760
If you can post a picture of pin header onborad, that would be great. However, I would configure like below and if you connect it backwards, no harm is done. Assume the pin header is 10 (2x5):
Left led and right led are for the power and harddisk leds.
1-2 is power led, the green lead is + wire 3 to 5
6-7 is harddisk led, the red lead is +
8-9 is power switch, doesn't matter what way you connect.