Should I replace my sink and fan?

wolfmcbeard · May 17, 2019

5 hours ago, WoodenMarker said:

It should. The mounting holes should be standard but you'd probably need a dell fan adapter to plug it into the motherboard.

I was planning on harvesting the connector from my old 980's fan and using the basically dying pc to test things out.
Maybe make a DIY Dell to standard fan adapter.
Maybe an aio liquid cooler for the lols.

DJ46 · May 17, 2019

I've seen heatsinks just like this in several HP desktops and the backplate was glued to the back of the motherboard terrifyingly well.

I only wanted to swap the cooler on one of those (along with the case for better height clearance) and I decided to give up instead and just sell the board and cooler as a set, though I already wanted to swap the motherboard (for looks mostly).

I remember checking back then whether someone took one of those backplates off successfully and not finding much. It just seemed like a huge risk of scratching the board with any tool that could work.

wolfmcbeard · May 17, 2019

4 minutes ago, DJ46 said:

I've seen heatsinks just like this in several HP desktops and the backplate was glued to the back of the motherboard terrifyingly well.

I only wanted to swap the cooler on one of those (along with the case for better height clearance) and I decided to give up instead and just sell the board and cooler as a set, though I already wanted to swap the motherboard (for looks mostly).

I remember checking back then whether someone took one of those backplates off successfully and not finding much. It just seemed like a huge risk of scratching the board with any tool that could work.

Yeah, I've noticed some OEMs do that, Dell seems to design most of their systems to use cooler mounting through the motherboard to the back of the case, noticed this on the OptiPlex 790 and 980sff, so I'm running on the assumption that the 7010 does the same.
So as long as the screws for a given cooler are long enough and have the right threads, I should be able to use the back of the case still as the mounting bracket.