Dell’s sneaky case design
April 28, 2010 at 1:59 pm
I unpacked a Dell T5500 today that I needed to install a GTX 285 GPU-capable graphics card in for one of my professors only to find that the card’s extra power connections interfered with the fold-down hard drive tray.
Dell’s case designs have been getting better and better over the years, but it looked like they’d shot themselves in the foot trying to make the T5500 case smaller. I figured I could eliminate the fold out hard drive tray completely by putting the drive in the slot for the floppy drive. After removing the hard drive from the tray, a very easy screw-less operation, I found that the section of the drive tray interfering with the GTX 285 could be removed! Dell was more clever with their design than I thought. I put the drive in the other section of the hard drive tray, unscrewed the conflicting part, and the drive tray folded down into place perfectly, leaving the full-size double-width GTX 285 card clear with the power connectors easily reachable.
Thank you, Dell, for thinking ahead!
Categories: Computing
