Question Dell XPS 8650 slowed to snail's crawl after fan upgrade??

Oct 29, 2023
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Hello All,

I purchased a Dell XPS 8650 over a year ago and the dreaded noisy fan started up in the PSU. after doing some research, i discovered the proprietary nature of the power supply. Instead of paying out the nose for a "new" one from eBay, i decided to replace the two cheap fans with Noctua fans, since both are 3 wire and in my mind would be compatible. I got them in, spliced the old wires onto the new fans, double checked everything, and put it all back together. I booted up the computer and found the thing was creeping along as slower than a snails pace. My machine that i was playing games like The Forest and ARK Survival had to stop and wait to open up local folders and boot time was reaching minutes.

I took it back apart and again checked my work in the PSU, and found two of the thin wires from the newly installed fans had pulled away from the heat shrink and were touching. So i unplugged the fans altogether and hooked it back up. The computer has continued to run slow. I checked through the BIOS to make sure it wasn't reset or corrupted, and everything looked fine there. I checked event logs to see if there was anything abnormal there and I saw nothing. the built in hardware diagnostic shows no faults, even with the PSU fans unplugged. So i started with the cheapest components and replaced the NVME SSD to see if it was affected. After replacing, the computer is still running at a crawl. The following link is to the current Userbenchmark i ran yesterday: https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/65159442

I checked the PSU 10-pin connector for any oddball voltages, but all of the 12v pins were showing 12.4, which doesn't seem like that would be too much of a fluctuation to cause real issues. It doesn't make sense to me that the PSU would cause a slowdown like this, it should either work or it wouldn't. My question is, what should i look at next to try to fix this problem? do i replace the Motherboard, which unfortunately would mean replacing the case and PSU as well, since Dell seems to like non standard hardware. Or do i try replacing the processor? I know the benchmark shows the processor being the slowest component, but could that be caused by something wrong with the motherboard? I appreciate any help you all can give me!
 

punkncat

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Are you getting an error message on boot about the CPU fan being disconnected?

As you already know and mentioned, Dell are slap full of fun proprietary connectors and hardware (sometimes). Looking at your spec on UBM I think it would be worthwhile to consider purchasing a new mid grade or higher motherboard with BIOS updates available for 13th/14th gen, a new case and power supply and bring the other hardware over to the new machine. This may or may not cause issue with your OS license. I would make sure to try and tie that to your MS account before making changes.
 
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Oct 29, 2023
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No error message for CPU fan. it was the two internal fans on the power supply that are unplugged currently, so im mostly sure the Mobo cant really "see" those to throw an error code. Do you think the problem could be the processor? i'd hate to buy everything else, then find i need to drop another chunk of change on a new proc, too. Thanks!
 

punkncat

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Pretty impossible for me to know.

Can you monitor temps?

Edit- Dell has a program called Optimizer that may give more information and offer suggestions. I typically do not leave it installed permanently myself, but might help narrow down the issue.
 
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Reactions: davis431
Oct 29, 2023
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Pretty impossible for me to know.

Can you monitor temps?

Edit- Dell has a program called Optimizer that may give more information and offer suggestions. I typically do not leave it installed permanently myself, but might help narrow down the issue.
Hey Punkncat,

Sorry for the delay in replying. First, i tried to use the Optimizer program, but i guess these particular XPS machines aren't compatible for whatever reason (boo).

I checked the temperatures with HWInfo, and the CPU stays right around 25-28 Celsius, even when i use CPU-Z's stress test. I did opt for dell's little water cooler when i got this, and so far as i can tell, it's functioning fine.

I can add a short logfile of the sensor readings and/or the report from HWInfo here if that would be helpful at all.

Thanks again for your time and help!

EDIT: I went ahead and attached the .html report from HWInfo

 
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