Installing the Front Fan

By looking at the pic above, I think you have already noticed what I have done here in order to install the third party ''Front Fan''.

The white cable is usually the '' senser cable''

The Black and Red cable is for ''Power Cable, + and - ''

When you install the third party front fan, you will encounter the Fan error messages when you turn on your PC.

There is no way to eliminate the BIOS error message so I came up with the simple idea. The idea was to decieve the dell motherboard senser.

That cable in the above pic was from ''Antec Tri cool 120mm ''



I chose this particular front fan because of two reasons. First, you can control manually the speed of fan. There are small switch which allow this. Second, I like the blue shiny LED.

But I don't recommend this product because of two reasons. First, lower RPM doesn't cool down the CPU heatsink effectively so you need to choose the fastest RPM which is quite noisy. Second, it gets dusty quickly.


1. I had two spare Dell Front fan and shroud so I cut the power cable of the fan.


As you can see, there are 5 pin holes but there are 4 cables. I don't know what's that Blue one is for.


Anyways, I have cut all cables to very short length except for the white cable.

2. You need a scissors a little to peel off the cable cover to expose the copper wire. You need to use the scissors very carefully of you will cut off entire cable and ruin everything!!



3. You need to peel off the white cable of the new front fan as well.

4. As you have learned in primary school, you should be able to twist nicely both exposed wires from white cables.

5. I used tape additionally to cover the twisted area.

6. Now, you can either use the original shroud(make sure you screw the back!) or you can buy a better quality one and install it without the shroud so that you can make more room in E521.


I was looking at this Noctua fan because it seems so quiet and looks cool. I don't know if this is good for E521 with the heatsink that holds the AMd 6400+ though. You can find a better one I guess.


The disadvantage of this method is that the fan is always spinning at the highest rate. From the right beginning, it was obvious to me that the E521 motherboard can not control the third party fan with it's senser so I choese this particulart fan that you can control the fan RPM. But unfortunately, it was too loud (to me).


The advantage is that you can mod your case a bit further and you will get no BIOS error messages.

You can use that modified cable (first pic) for any other fan. Sometimes, I connect the 92mm Noctua fan to that cable. As long as that 5 pin is plugged in to the E521 motherboard, then you won't get any error messages.



I am trying to find a better method here because this method is too simple that the motherboard can not recognise how to adjust the speed of the new fan.

Probably, that blue cable has some answer to this. I am not sure.




After 3 month later, I have changed my mind to the previous dell front fan and shroud.
Because it is tiring to manually change the RPM of the new fan everytime you play the games, I came back the old one because that, as long as you clean the fan properly, it is operating quietly and efficiently afterall.

I had two spare front fans so it was easy enough to go back to the original fan but if you don't have the spare one, I really suggest you not to install the third party front fan for this E521 unfortunately.

Although I DID tell you one of the method here, I don't mean that installing the new fan is recommended for E521. I only gave you the possibility here which is tested by me.
It is your choice here. I personally couldn't find a good front fan for E521 anyway.


This is a warning but PLEASE DON'T USE SOLDERING MATERIAL TO JOIN COPPER WIRES OR ANY WIRES IN E521.

First of all, it is dangerous if you don't know which wires go to which one(risk of damageing components and explosion) . Second of all, soldering copper wires(for example) is dangerous activity. If you don't know about the wire, just leave it and twist them instead.



(I will up date this part if necessary)