Cooling

One word sums up our thoughts on the cooling system Dell has employed for the XPS 710: remarkable. Not only does Dell’s cooling do a good job of keeping the CPU and GPU cool, it does so while generating next to no noise. This is pretty impressive considering the hardware inside the system, but more on that later…

The key to this cooling system is the front and rear fascias of the system itself. You see, the entire bottom portion of the front of the case is vented, as is the entire back of the case. On the other side of the front fascia lies a large 120mm case fan.

Air is sucked in from the front of the case, through the 120mm case fan, and from there across the system components.

Finally, the air exhausts out the back of the case. With a large 120mm case fan up front, the system can push a lot of air. It’s a very low RPM fan though, so the fan runs nearly silent, even up close with the case removed we could barely hear it.

Sitting just above the 120mm fan is a slightly smaller CPU fan. Like the main case fan, it sucks in cool air from the front of the case and runs it through a large black plastic duct before it exits out the right side of the duct and ultimately outside the system case itself. Again, this fan does a very good job of keeping the CPU cool while generating very little noise. The heatsink unit Dell uses to keep the CPU cool uses a mixture of copper and aluminum: multiple copper heat pipes are attached to a copper base plate for drawing heat off the CPU, while a large aluminum heatsink then helps to keep the heat pipes themselves cool.

The CPU cooling system itself reminds us a lot of the high-end Scythe Ninja cooler, although the XPS 710’s cooler isn’t quite as large as the Ninja, but it does have more fins than the Ninja. The heatsink/fan unit is one of the only components inside the Dell XPS 710 system that you will need a screwdriver to remove, virtually everything else inside the system can be removed sans tools, including the hard drives and graphics cards.

Hard drive cooling

As anyone with a little knowledge of hard drives can tell you, one of the leading causes of premature drive failure is excessive heat. Quite simply, if you don’t take care of the heat near your drive(s), it can ultimately kill your hard disk drive prematurely. This can be avoided with just a little bit of cooling, but it’s astonishing the number of systems in the wild with little or no cooling near the hard disk drives.

Fortunately the Dell XPS 710 isn’t one of these systems. Dell includes a small fan directly adjacent to the hard disk drive bays, and again, the hot air from the hard disk drives exits out the back of the case, just like the rest of the system components and the CPU.

With so much attention to detail on the system’s cooling, we were honestly a little surprised to see that Dell stuck with NVIDIA’s reference cooling on the dual GeForce 7950 GX2 cards our system shipped with. The stock 7950 GX2 cooler runs a little noisier than say the fan on the GeForce 7900 GTX or GeForce 8800 GTX, but once housed inside the Dell case we never heard the cards, even when running under load after an extended gaming session.

Dell really deserves credit for putting together such a powerful, yet quiet system. Again, our XPS 710 rig was equipped with a Core 2 Extreme QX6700, 1-kilowatt PSU, and two GeForce 7950 GX2 cards for quad-SLI, yet the system was still barely audible from a distance of 3 feet!

Dell has taken several steps to keep noise at bay. Part of it is the near silent fans Dell uses for the system-level components, but another part of the reason why the XPS 710 is so quiet is the thickness of the case, which helps to deaden the noise inside the case. Dell even uses foam inserts on the connecting points of the case cover, this helps to ensure that noise doesn’t escape the chassis, while also preventing air from escaping.

The only thing Dell’s really missing are dust filters for the fans themselves. Then again, considering that most of their clientele probably will never crack open their case, a dust filter probably isn’t necessary.