Dell Inspiron 3670 Gaming PC Build - $365 

That PC still runs great, I only just recently put it aside as a backup. My employer offered to let me purchase a higher end machine to handle my workload better and I wasn't going to turn that down! Good luck, the 3670 was a fun build and served me well for a long time.

Thanks for checking back in! Nice to hear when your video helped someone. Good luck with your cooler install. Looks far superior to the stock one in mine! Let me know how it goes.

@@shanesdiy I will Sir! It’s a tall cooler so I believe the side fan will need to be moved to the other vent square. I would love to swap out the Kingwin for the Noctua version. The NF-A8 FLX ( that one has the molex adapter which I use on my psu.) I don’t think I mentioned I didn’t use the fan adapter just three molex connectors from my psu directly. Maybe I should give that another try. Kingwin is 1700rpm, 25 decibels and 30 cubic ft per minute ; the Noctua is 2000rpm, 16 decibels and 50 cubic meters per hour. Conversion tells me they move almost exactly the same amount of air. Wow. Looking this up as I’m typing. It comes down to build quality and life of the fan that justifies $16 for the Noctua and $5 for the Kingwin. I’m staying with the Kingwins for now.

Yes, smart thing to do would have been to remove the motherboard first but I was careful and thoroughly blew it out with compressed air once the cutting was done. Thanks for stopping by and sharing some wisdom!

Thank you, good luck!

@@shanesdiy Hey Shane! What size drill bit did you have to use? I don’t have any of the tools unfortunately. For the three fans, the one on the side is intake and the two on the rear are exhaust right? Are there any issues with the motherboard not liking those fans or their rpms? It doesn’t look like you had any trouble though. That’s one of the things I have not done yet is extra fans. Thanks!

The hole saw was 4" and it has a 1/4" bit in the center. Not sure if that's the bit you are referring to. If you just have to make a bunch of small holes for the PSU fan just make them as big and as close together as you can. Even 1/4" holes would be ok as long as there are enough of them. Yes, the side fan is intake and two rear are exhaust. The CPU fan is also intake and draws in from the same side as the fan I added if you are still using the OEM CPU fan and shroud. The added side fan required a bit of drilling to make screw holes, the rear fans dropped right in. I would at least add those two rear fans at a minimum. The splitter I used will power up to 9 fans plus the CPU fan. It is powered by an available 4 pin molex plug and just uses the CPU fan output just for the PWM signal to adjust the fan speed. The motherboard doesn't power any of the fans with the splitter I used, all power comes from the molex plug.

@@shanesdiy Thank you! I like how the back of the case is ready for two. I might have to get blue led on the fans like yours. Gotta be a little different! Lol

Shane, another dumb question. If I’m looking to put an m.2 drive in from crucial and it says nvme...will it work here? Dells specs say “One M.2 2230 slot for wireless and bluetooth combo card • One M.2 2230/2280 slot for Solid-State Drive (SSD)/Intel Optane memory”. Nothing about nvme...ugh Thanks.

Sounds awesome. I have several PC's with fans on the outside and all sorts of "Frankenstein" mods, whatever you have to do to get the best performance I say! Really most of the time, who besides you will ever see these PC's? Thanks for the comments.

CPU fan is PWM, the others run full speed but they are pretty quiet.

I still have the stock CPU fan with shroud that pulls air in from the side panel plus the 3 addon fans in the case. Running MSI Kombustor's CPU burner at 4 cores I don't see higher than about 63°C (145°F) at 100% usage with the room ambient temperature at 77°F. The 2 add on rear fans and the one additional side fan seem to do a pretty good job. Do you have the i3-8100 like mine? If you have a faster CPU it may run hotter. You may also want to re-paste your CPU if it still has the original paste. With the splitter I used it takes a signal from the motherboard CPU fan connector and the splitter has a port labeled for the CPU fan because the MB still gets the speed reference signal back from the fan. My other 3 fans are only 3 wire so run at 100% all the time. These particular fans are not loud, I can hear them but it doesn't bother me. According to the fan splitter ad (link in the description) if you put 4 wire fans on it they other fans will throttle up/down as well. I cannot confirm this.

@@shanesdiy Mine has an i7-8700, temps often hover around 75-80°C while gaming, sometimes spiking above 90°C. I've ordered new thermal paste and hoping that will improve things a bit. From what I've read, upgrading the cpu cooler doesn't seem too easy because of the limited space. I see David Noble managed a cpu cooler upgrade but the case cover doesn't fit with it in place. I'm hoping to try the case fans first and see what impact they have along with the thermal paste. Think I'll go with 3 pin fans running 100% all the time too. Thanks

I have one of these machines as well. The CPU's seldom reach 60 c even when overclocked to 3800 Mhz. And that's with the stock cooler. Running A/C in the room during summer months helps a lot, too.

Thank you for watching, I appreciate the comments. Enough holes as large as you can, say 1/2" would probably be fine, just do many and as close as possible to each other. I think I'd do that over inverting it. To invert it you would have to cut the chassis much more to make room for the AC plug, not sure if any other fitment issues would be a problem. Inverted would be pulling in warmer air and that could effect cooling some. So far I've had no cooling issues, seems to be running very well under a heavy load. Good luck on your build! That should perform great.

@@shanesdiy Thanks! It turns out I can get the system and an i5-8400 for right at $200. With 16gb of 2666 ddr4 for around $50. so roughly $250 total. With my psu and gtx 1070 I think that's a good price. But do I really need to upgrade. My i7-4790 in a Precision T1700 is running fine...too many decisions! lol

I'm a believer you can hack/modify pretty much anything. One challenge with this particular motherboard is that the front USB, headphone jack, SD card reader, and power switch are hard mounted to the MB and stick out the front of the case. Any larger case you would not be able to easily access those items.

@@shanesdiy Thank you. This will surely help!

Thanks for your comments. I'm sure I could "shoe horn" more fans in here if they were needed. With this CPU even with the little stock cooler, it never gets very hot. I don't play games very often but my kids do occasionally and I'll watch the temps when they do and even with demanding games I've not seen it get too hot.

@@shanesdiy nice I can get one for under 100 locally and wasn't sure how it would be but if I could do the case like you did yours and maybe cut the top out for the AIO Cooler I'm really thinking about picking it up

At 16:47 I show the fan splitter I used and explain it a bit. It powers the CPU fan and up to 9 other fans. It gets powered by a Molex connector. The Amazon link to the fan splitter I used is in the video description. Thanks for watching!

@@shanesdiy thanks a lot I thought that's what you meant but I got confused I can get all that at micro center here in Columbus so I'm good

I would love to have a Micro Center close by, nearest location is 400 miles away... Good luck on your build.

@@shanesdiy the headquarters stores 12 minutes from my house it's awesome.

Probably a good idea especially if you don't have the right tools. It was quite a project to cut that large hole out. I do like that my PSU gets cold fresh air rather than warm air from inside the cabinet though.

I get that but buying tools for that is just a waste of money imo if I am not going to use it for anything else and I could just buy a case with that money saved

@@shreyasdalal I agree with you, I already had the tools. No way you would want to buy the tools just to do that.

Sounds like a nice machine you've built! I added the links to the fans and splitter to the description. It's pretty simple to install. Basically, pull the CPU fan plug from the motherboard and it plugs into the red connector on the splitter. The splitter comes with a wire connector that connects it to the motherboards CPU fan output and it uses this to control the CPU fan speed. The splitter also comes with a Molex plug to connect to the PSU where it gets all power for the fans. Then you plug in up to 9 additional 3 or 4 pin fans. The splitter attaches to the cabinet with some double sided foam. There is additional information on the product listing at the link above. Thanks for visiting the channel.

@@shanesdiy Awesome, thanks for the help man. I'm going to buy them and set them up!

While I don't know how your old system sounded, I don't think mine sounds terrible and I don't have high end speakers on it. I did have to fiddle with some audio settings within Windows to improve it. What operating system are you using? There are quite a few settings you can adjust and some settings that you'd think might be good make it worse.

@@shanesdiy Windows 10, I thought I had tried everything, but maybe I missed something? I opened up the Inspiron but I didn't see a PCI or PCIe slot - do you know if it has one hidden somewhere?

I have my video card plugged in to the PCIe x16 slot and there are 2 PCIe x1 slots. Just those 3 PCI slots.

Thank you for your comment and the kind words. The SSD did not give any errors, I just had to clone the old drive and put it on the SSD. As long as they are the same size the PC shouldn't know the difference. Many different software to clone a drive, I used Macrium Reflects free version. Using the proper RAM sticks the bios should recognize it automatically. If you are trying to change memory speeds or such you may have to enter the Bios and make changes. For this particular system it is not compatible with newer higher speed memory. For the graphics card mine loaded with some Windows default drivers and just had to download the latest drivers from the graphics card manufacturer to get maximum performance and features from it. Don't be intimidated, take your time to find the right parts and you'll do fine. Unfortunately, soon after building this PC, the graphics card prices went through the roof so difficult to do this build again for just $365...

Tried it on a few machines but any more I just be sure to keep an eye on the dust and take the machine out in the garage and blow it out with compressed air periodically. I started with a filter on one of the last machines I built but it reduced the flow so much even when clean I ended up pulling it. If you have sufficient flow then absolutely install a filter. Either way, be sure to keep everything clean. In my day job working on industrial control panels I've seen too many completely plugged cabinet filters, people think since you have a filter you can ignore it.