PICS of my new, cooler running E6400 (internals)

What do you mean?

 

Thanks for the photos. That heat pipe is definitely fatter than on my E6400 (left side on the attached image - yours is on the right) and the connection between the end of the heat pipe and the ?GPU/chipset? has changed. However, unless you have photos of your previous heatsinks then you can't be sure that this is the cause of the better cooling. The connection between the end of the heatpipe and the GPU is a potential weakness in the cooling system. If that doesn't conduct the heat well then the fan will run fast but not be effective.

As for the base fitting properly, your may need to push down a bit harder the make sure all the little hooks latch as you slide the base on. I have a small gap at the front edge of the base by the SD card slot. It does not trouble me. The base itself fits without any looseness.

John

 

Wow, John! Your heatpipe is VERY thin. I got my E6400 on the outlet about 4 months ago and it is like akwit's, so they must have changed it around that time. Can you tell us the part no of your fan and heatpipe?

By the way. To remove your heatsink, you need to disconnect the fan cable (only cable coming out of the fan) and remove the 4 screws holding the assembly down right at the bend of the copper pipe (above processor). However,you may not want to do that because that will break the original connection between the processor and heatsink thermal paste, so your system may run slightly hotter (but nothing close to what you had before) if you do take it off. You can find other disassembly instructions on the Dell support site, under manuals.

 

Wow, I am surprised as well. I guess they did change the heatsink itself...

 

Now, that's not very a nice thing to say - is it ? <just kidding>

Would it be safe to conclude that the 'thinner pipe' is due to the lower heat, and thereby lesser cooling requirement, of the onboard Intel X4500MHD vs the nVidia 's GPU, which runs considerably hotter and thereby requires a better (fatter pipe) cooling solution.

I'll admit, I quickly scanned thru this thread and might have missed some details. But I'm not sure how you reached this conclusion, if weirdo's 4 month old E6400's heatsink and pipe look exactly the same as akwit's new one.

 

Well, I'm not sure if they change heat sinks depending on what GPU is installed (would they actually do that?). Actually, I have no idea haha.

 

My complaint about my cooling system is that it has a lot of metal for P series CPU and integrated graphics. It works fine for me and I don't want something even bigger and heavier.

There are some part numbers on the attached photo.

John

 

See below for a picture from my E6400. It was bought in November 2008 and it has Intel graphics. Heatpipe seems to be the same size as John Ratsey's computer. It would be interesting to see what the heatpipe looks like on an early E6400 with nVidia graphics. My E6400 doesn't have any serious heat issues but it would be nice to get the chipset temperature down a few degress because that would make the computer less noisy.



Edit: Moved picture to ImageShack.

 

The heatsink shipping with NVS160M units is different from the heatsink shipping with X4500 units. The NVS160M heatsink not only has a fatter heatpipe, it has an extra metal extrusion for the NVS160M and metallic pads that touch the bottom panel. I had akwit's thermal solution on my NVS160M machine and John's on my X4500 machine.

So for those of you looking to shave a degree or two off your X4500, you could in theory upgrade the heatsink to the NVS160M heatsink if you can find one... XD

 

Ah. Thanks for that clarification, Commander Wolf. I would have thought that in an effort to simplify production, Dell would have stuck with just one pipe. Unless, of course, they had significant $ savings from the reduced copper usage. How much extra can that copper be? $2?

Furthermore, if akwit now has the standard heatpipe for the Nvidia GPU, he may have had the thinner, Intel heatpipe on his other Nvidia systems. That is the only plausible explanation I can come up with: the people assembling his computers used the wrong part. Twice.

After further investigation into my Nvidia system, I found that although it was bought by me refurb in Dec '08, the system was built in September. Therefore, I believe that my system should have had the same thermals as akwit's original systems SHOULD have had. I don't see any other explanation besides the faulty parts. Hopefully akwit has more info.