Dell just amazes me with the ways that it finds to customize the internals of their PCs such that one cannot buy hardware from the open market. I've had this issue with power supplies for Dell before where the Dell case makes it very difficult to find a power supply that will fit in it. The latest on this front is the CPU fan. The 3-pin connecter that is used to supply power to it from the motherboard has a custom casing to it that prevents the use of a normal 3-pin connecter. My solution? Get out the wire strippers, take the connecter off of the defunct cpu fan and splice it on to the new fan. Appears to have worked just fine.