Too much trouble
Thanks for your input. The link was interesting reading. I have not disassembled my Dell E310 to see what the necessary procedure would be to install a non-Dell Intel board. I thought the first course of action would be to find someone who has attempted (hopefully successfully) an upgrade. One point made earlier in the thread recommended a new case so the panel connector would not be an issue. I'm beginning to lean towards scrapping the E310 upgrade idea based on the fact that Dells are cheap to begin with. By the time you buy a new case, PSU, motherboard, and even perhaps upgrade the RAM and video card, it might be cheaper to buy a new one. Maybe that's why Dell builds them this way. The Intel boards alone can be $100 and up. I bought my E310 from the Dell Outlet as a scratch-and-dent for $194 when I found a 40% discount coupon online. That doesn't happen very often. I couldn't buy the board and cpu for that. It came with a P4 521 2.8GHz, 80gig SATA hard drive, 1G 533MHz RAM, cd-rw/dvd rom combo, XP Media Center. I've done some upgrades, P4 640 3.2GHz cpu, 2G ram, 2 cd-rw/dvd burner optical drives, 256MB PCI video card, PCI firewire card (I do video capture and editing) and 300G hard drive. I took out that useless PCI modem that came with it to use the slot for something worthwhile and am getting the most out of it that I can. It just doesn't look like it would be worth the time and expense to upgrade this particular model. Dell's been around the block a few times and I'm sure they know this. They're not in the business of selling parts, they're in the business of selling assembled PCs, Servers, Notebooks, and such.