Dell XPS 710 BTX to ATX Conversion

[schmidty169]

About 2 years ago my XPS 710 Motherboard died between this thread and one on Facepunch I was able to successfully do the ATX conversion. Thank you all so much for laying down the ground work. Here is my results.
Rear panel:

Actually used a grill for a car to fabricate the new grill work. Used Bondic to fuse the plastic grill.
Fans:

Moved the old CPU fan up front. Had to repin the Dell fans.

Motherboard:

MSI Z97 Gaming board. Intell iCore 7, 32G Crossair Vengence RAM. Stuck my old Nvidia GTX 7900's back in.
LEDs:

Bought toggle switches and put them in a IDE 3.5 floppy box.
Pins for 710 MCB:

I haven't done the front panel mic and head phones yet. Also found if you put multi-meter + on pin 13 and - on pin 9 the red LED lights. Could not get green or blue so I just wired it via toggles. But in case someone else wants to play with it more. Got a cable extender coming in to get that ATX power cable from laying across the RAM and be able to clean it up a bit more. Planning on a window kit so I can see all the pretty.

 

[schmidty169]

I got the Front Audio connectors kind of working. Mic and Head Phones work, just have to figure out how to wire up the Sense function. Nothing from 710, 720, or 730 pin outs has the sense wires discovered for the 40 pin front panel connector.

 

[John Tauwhare]

Moved images from photobucket to postimage and setup new links. Hoping postimage stays stable and $free for a long time!

Would love to see your images schmidty169 - hope you can restore them? My record of the front panel pins is earlier in the thread but I don't know what the sense function is.

 

[Thebobo]

Moved images from photobucket to postimage and setup new links. Hoping postimage stays stable and $free for a long time!

Would love to see your images schmidty169 - hope you can restore them? My record of the front panel pins is earlier in the thread but I don't know what the sense function is.

Yea I would like to see them as well, if possible.

 

[schmidty169]

I don't know why they don't show here? If you right click the image and open in new browser they show just fine so it's not the URL's themselves? I used the IMG tag? I figured it out by viewing the source code. When I copied the link address to the images it shows as imgur.com/Q7TgvNk and all of yours ended in jpg. So I just added .jpg to the end of all my links and viola!

 

[schmidty169]

I ended up not playing with the pin out from the 40 pin. Instead I picked up a audio cable from the 720 which had the ten pin audio connector

I needed to connect to the board (the black 10 pin connector.). While the 710 has a flat white 10 pin for the motherboard side.

Figuring out the pins to use as

. I did have some issues though. I could not get the mic jack to work properly. It senses when I plug in the mic, but doesn't work to record any voice. On the other hand the head phones do not sense when I plug them in, but if I plug in the mic they work. This tells me that Dell has some how tied the port together on the front panel. In my PC when I plug in the mic it shows both ports active and shuts off the rear speakers. The board has a rear mic port so I'm not too concerned with the mic jack in the front not working. (Truth be I've never really used it.) So I'm just going to cut the plug off an old set of phones that doesn't work and I can use that to trigger the sense function through the mic jack to switch between the rear speakers to the head phones. A little bit of a hack, but heck isn't that what this whole thing was about anyways, lol. Eventually I'll just get a blue tooth adapter so I can use my bone conduction headset anyways for audio and mic while gaming.

 

[Thebobo]

Thanks for all the pictures and diagrams it will come in handy I am sure.

 

[John Tauwhare]

Great job schmidty169. Thanks for updating your image links and welcome to the Dell XPS 700-series ATX club!

 

[thomas0312]

Thanks for all ur posts guys, this will help me a lot to MOD mine. For now im stuck at frontpanel stage , cant manage to make the TOPLEDS and BTMLEDS to work. i tried like u said pin13 on + and pin 9 on - and it wont light anything. pls help me i really wanna make those work

 

[eightman]

thanks for your nice complete post about this XPS mod.
here in France I just bought a XPS 710 sold as not working, i plan to put an ATX into and I found lot of stuff here.
(i don't have 3.5" HDD holders in the box, i will have to find a solution)

 

[schmidty169]

Thanks for all ur posts guys, this will help me a lot to MOD mine. For now im stuck at frontpanel stage , cant manage to make the TOPLEDS and BTMLEDS to work. i tried like u said pin13 on + and pin 9 on - and it wont light anything. pls help me i really wanna make those work

Like a lot of us, I think the best bet is to just use toggles and wire it yourself. I got the LED's to light up with the multi-meter, didn't actually wire any power to it as I couldn't figure out how to get all the colors. So I just put toggles in. You can see my toggles in the floppy bay. I actually rewired it after that shot. Have the yellow turning power on and off to the circuit. Just remember Dell uses a + Anode set up. 1 power 3 grounds (RGB). I actually bought a fan switch originally but didn't read the fine print. The switches didn't go to 0v and always had power so I couldn't effectively achieve an on / off state the LED's require. But I picked up toggle switches off Amazon and they fit perfectly in the fan switch case (once I removed the variable switches). This also let me keep all my wiring tidy inside the box in the floppy slot. This allows you to splice into each of the LED boards with the 4 wires you need. I moved the back panel LED to the bottom of the case so it shines up on my board. I'm almost never in the back of the PC so it's kind of a waste there to me.

 

[abaccharetti]

Hi,

Is somebody could help me ?
I Mod my xps 710 case, i try to connect the genuine power switch from front panel with an atx MB.

So i cut the 40 pin wire, i took the pin #23 and the grnd #14, and i connect them to a standard 2pin PSwitch.
But nothing happen.

Do i need to put more power ? what is the "POWER+" pin #27?

Thanks to All