If you have a Dell Precision 470 they can’t use more than 4GB of RAM because Dell annoyingly put in a setup that requires a RAM Fan be installed. Now this system is old, the fans are rare and are being sold for £150+
Now there maybe a reason for the RAM fan. As this is an old server system maybe Dell assumed the system would be under heavy load and could get hot and unstable without one. Or could of just been a money making scheme as they don’t come with the fan as far as I’m aware.
Anyway. Someone at work uses one as a desktop rig and recently we have to put 16GB in it and couldn’t due to lack of a RAM fan. Got round it by Richard reading this forum post
http://forums.cnet.com/7723-7586_102-261994.html
And creating this jumper switch, simply ripped off from an old machine.
Pins 1 and 3 need to be used, expose the top of the cable
Then twist the ends together
Then tape it up with insulation tape (Richard actually cut the wire down hence looks smaller than above images)
And that’s it
Direct link to last two images as don’t fit on the site properly
£150+ cut down to £1.19 (cost of the insulation tape).
Seems to work fine. System will be monitored to see if it causes issues or gets overly hot, but should be fine.
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The same solution applies to the Precision 670 but I had to work that out for myself some while ago. Some cheeky americans are selling this fix for $10.50 + $3.31 postage via ebay. Far more expensive than your solution but if you paid 1.19 for a reel of insulating tape I’d say that you were done!
Cheers, Geoff
If I remember right the £1.19 was for a roll of about 3 or 4 🙂 or was from Maplin and Maplin are always overpriced 🙂
I Thank You in advanced for this i have an old 670 that i want to upgrade and use i just brought 8 gb ram for it and want to goto 16gb in the future this is very useful and inexpensive this is a brilliant work around for the fan issue and for this again i thank you…..
P.S a little something to dell for basically selling systems that need other components to make them work to the best of there ability F YOU I HOPE YOU GO BUST…sorry for that…but a 150-200 fan is way out of proportion i could buy a whole new machine for that and put it together myself
I did exactly what you describe, for my 670. Powered on, heard about 10 “click-click-pause”s, then diagnostic lights stayed: yellow-green-yellow-off, indicating a possible processor problem; no video output. I was very sad. Anyone else see this? Or not?
Sounds like a separate issue that just happened to kick in at the same time.