I use to poke around with a screwdriver in cases such as this. Hmm isnt the power on pins silk screened? It looks like they are.

xjas wrote:

The manual available from Dell says nothing about the connector beyond mentioning that it's there (calling it " Control panel connector (J8H1) "). Real helpful.

Well, for Dell you were not supposed to use that board with other case combination in the first place. They aren't motherboard vendors, but complete equipment vendors, so they aren't obligated to follow any connector standard that motherboard vendors would follow.

That aside, i guess they choose to fuse all the pins in a block because that block connects with a small board containing the switches, leds and sometimes even a Serial port header, in the ending side if i remember well. So it makes sense to use a flat ribbon cable and a connector header, than multiple twisted pair of cables and headers.

If there's solder pads for discrete connectors, that presents a multimeter opportunity - measure continuity between pins on the header connector and the solder pads.

But, yes, this would've been an attempt to reduce assembly time and costs, because they didn't have to worry about working in arbitrary cases.

If you can wait 1 day I had a site bookmarked with this!

This was the link I bookmarked years ago when I was thinking about using the motherboard in another case.
http://www.roberthancock.com/dell/fpconn.htm
Also check out the more information link on the 2nd line.
I never actually went though with the swap though so all I can say is good luck, its a nice motherboard apart from the pure evil non standard ATX connector.