Dell T5500 x5690 overheating problems

[fast85foxgt]

I have a Dell T5500 I recently acquired and went through it, cleaned it up and re-pasted the heat sink (The good "office building" piece).
Somehow my temps overall still sit about 51*C. When I run my game the CPU temps shoot up sky high into the 90*C range (At which point I turn it off.)...
I have installed speedfan and enabled dell support. All of these temperatures are with both fans supposedly running at 100% (fan 1's RPMs - 1400 ishj and fan 2's RPMs - 3600ish. Which weirds me out a bit considering they're both the factory cased 120mm fans that it came with. Why would they run at different speeds?)...
I tried 2 repastes on the cpu with Arctic MX4 with little success. Even pulling off the case side panel it only dropped to about 88*C during gameplay. Do I need more positive air flow or more exhaust airflow? I'm at a standstill and would appreciate any advice.

 

[william p]

There are 2 heatsinks for that. One is an aluminum block for 65W. CPUs and the other has 4 hetpipes for the 95-130W. CPUs.
U016F is the part#.
You need to understand how the cooling is supposed to work on that.
The HDD tray over the top of the CPU cooler, and the blue plastic memory shroud are part of the cooling system. They form 2 sides of a duct around the cooler that guides ALL the air from the fan through the cooler.
The fans are on 2 sepate PWM controllers. The CPU fan should speed up when the CPU gets hot.The fans are the same part. Some people add an 80mm. or 90mm fan to the back of the heatpipe cooler. Try swapping the 2 fans, maybe one has a problem. If you disconnect the blue PWM wire the fan should go to 100% speed.

 

[fast85foxgt]

There are 2 heatsinks for that. One is an aluminum block for 65W. CPUs and the other has 4 hetpipes for the 95-130W. CPUs.
U016F is the part#.
You need to understand how the cooling is supposed to work on that.
The HDD tray over the top of the CPU cooler, and the blue plastic memory shroud are part of the cooling system. They form 2 sides of a duct around the cooler that guides ALL the air from the fan through the cooler.
The fans are on 2 sepate PWM controllers. The CPU fan should speed up when the CPU gets hot.The fans are the same part. Some people add an 80mm. or 90mm fan to the back of the heatpipe cooler. Try swapping the 2 fans, maybe one has a problem. If you disconnect the blue PWM wire the fan should go to 100% speed.

Yes, I have the "good" heat sink. I have seen it referred as the "office building" piece. I have the fans manually setup through speed fan so i control their throttle. I set them to 100% when gaming and still doesn't make that big of a difference, but you mentioned that there is a shroud that i do not have on this rig. I bought it without and didn't even know it existed until mentioned. I will have to see if I can fit one in with my GTX 970. That may be my savior. I was getting nervous after the 2nd repaste and was thinking the heatsink wasn't making contact well. I have a 80mm fan off of a t7500, but there are no rear pwm ports on the MB. There is a internal usb port I could use, but cant find the dell proprietary connector adapter(for an exhaust fan since I assume the PSU fan alone cannot handle all the heat exhaustion)... I will probably pick up a used frontal fan piece, but am afraid since it would still be a used piece and could just end up with one fan still only pulling 1400rpm and one pulling 3600rpm.

 

[william p]

There is an optional HDD fan header on the far side of the MB by the PSU. It's the Dell 5 pin type. I wouldn't worry about an exhaust fan. That's a positive pressure design. All fans are on the intake side and the air is directed where it's most needed. If you pull the blue wire out of the connector on the slow fan , and it doesn't speed up then the fan is bad. Those type of fans idle @ 30% so 1200rpm/3600rpm would be about right. If the fan is OK and the air is guided correctly you should have no problems with cooling.

 

[fast85foxgt]

There is an optional HDD fan header on the far side of the MB by the PSU. It's the Dell 5 pin type. I wouldn't worry about an exhaust fan. That's a positive pressure design. All fans are on the intake side and the air is directed where it's most needed. If you pull the blue wire out of the connector on the slow fan , and it doesn't speed up then the fan is bad. Those type of fans idle @ 30% so 1200rpm/3600rpm would be about right. If the fan is OK and the air is guided correctly you should have no problems with cooling.

So coming back to this issue I apparently solved it, but do not understand as to how it would. I swapped the fan connections vice versa and all of a sudden my CPU stays well in range. Very weird... I would assume that the lower speed fan was hitting the CPU and then the high speed went to RAM. I also got the harddrive caddy that sits in the drive slot with the fan. It helps tremendously with my GPU temps..../.

If you still get this reply I figured I would ask you. I bought a spare T3500 for $25 complete minus drives. It had one bad stick of ram and the girl prior had 4 sticks in instead of 3 (dual channel) She said the PSU had died, but heres the interesting part. Testing the PSU standing up it doesn't turn on most of the times, but when I lay the tower on its side the PSU is completely fine. I went into BIOS and did diagnostics so it was stable. Is this something that's repairable or should I just opt out on another used PSU? I have read its quite dangerous to open up PSU's
.

 

[william p]

I would replace the PSU. There are capacitors in there that will store power and can cause injury. Actually the T3500 is designed to be used as a tower, or desktop, or rack mounted. There is a horizontal drive faceplate, and the drives can be installed sideways.
https://www.dell.com/community/Desktops-General/change-Precision-T3500-Vertical-DVD-Drive-to-horizontal-position/td-p/5187868
But obviously there's some thing loose in the PSU and no good is going to come from that. The PSU in those is 100% modular. You just unplug the harness and swap out the PSU alone. There were bigger PSUs for the ones that had 2x GPUs. But then you will need the correct T3500 harness which requires MB removal to install. Aftyermarket PSUs work also.

 

[william p]

That Dell T3500 is quite a find, they're very popular here.
https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/dell-workstation-owners-club.243124/#post-3830958
And here.
https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/throttlestop-overclocking-desktop-pcs.235975/

 

[fast85foxgt]

I would replace the PSU. There are capacitors in there that will store power and can cause injury. Actually the T3500 is designed to be used as a tower, or desktop, or rack mounted. There is a horizontal drive faceplate, and the drives can be installed sideways.
https://www.dell.com/community/Desktops-General/change-Precision-T3500-Vertical-DVD-Drive-to-horizontal-position/td-p/5187868
But obviously there's some thing loose in the PSU and no good is going to come from that. The PSU in those is 100% modular. You just unplug the harness and swap out the PSU alone. There were bigger PSUs for the ones that had 2x GPUs. But then you will need the correct T3500 harness which requires MB removal to install. Aftyermarket PSUs work also.

Yeah, I figured that would be my path, but it never hurts to get a second opinion. I can pick a identical 525w psu replacement off eBay for around $30usd. And boy was I excited to ind it. I found it off of Facebook marketplace out of all places. Lots of people were contacting the girl about it, but she never sold it. I threw her an offer of $25 and picked it up an hour later. It's just a w3520 rig, but I bought a w3565 for $8 as well as a couple spare hdd's to throw in. It will be a solid backup rig.. My current T5500 is doing quite well. I have a issue which is weird where when I am doing light work it will start acting like I am hitting backspace on a page constantly. The only "symptom" I can see to know it is doing it is all of the task manager graphs and performance viewers act extremely "sped up". Kind of like as if it were going in fast motion x3. A simple re-boot fixes it. Just a bit funky.