Xbox 360 Slim Gets Gutted And… Painted White?

XBox in a Briefcase

We love portable console builds, and this one by [Daniel Fürstauer] is no exception. It’s a beautifully hacked Xbox 360 slim into an aluminum briefcase — complete with a screen and a full audio system!

He started by gutting the Xbox 360 slim and throwing out pretty much all of the original enclosure, minus the disc drive cover. Now what he did next was completely for aesthetics, but freaking awesome. He actually took the motherboard out, taped off some of the important components, and spray painted the entire thing white! We’re not too sure what effect this will have on some of the components, but it seems to work, and gives it a really unique look underneath his Plexiglas enclosure.

He housed the rest of it (complete with custom cooling fans!) inside of one of those nice aluminum briefcases, complete with a widescreen LCD monitor, and computer speakers. He even fit the power supply inside — all you have to do is plug it in! There’s also room for at least one controller, whose holding spot doubles as space for the disc drive to eject.

It’s a super slick build, and he’s even made a demonstration video of it:

We’ve seen lots of PS3 and Xbox 360 portable builds, but no PS4’s yet. Anyone up to the challenge?

 

15 thoughts on “Xbox 360 Slim Gets Gutted And… Painted White?

  1. Fail mod is fail mod?

    I like the part where he just paints over all the chips with heat sinks on them, then reapplies the heat sinks on top of the paint as if those components hadn’t just been covered by a thermal insulator.

    What really boggles my mind is why you wouldn’t just take a chunk of lucite/plexiglass, cut out holes for all the components that stick up (heatsinks, capacitors, coils, etc)- then spray paint that and mount it nicely overtop the board.

    I can’t imagine that poor unit is going to last for very long. And I bet the creator is going to wonder why it simply stopped working one day. Oh well, another sale for Microsoft I guess.

    1. Not to mention the fact that the conductivity of a material, paint in this case, can change with frequency. So that paint that exhibits no measurable conductivity at DC might be a short circuit at the frequencies seen on the board (memory, CPU, etc.).

      I’ll leave my motherboard as-is, I think.

      1. Not quite the conductivity, but the dielectric properties of the paint would have an effect on the impedance of the microstrips (as in tracks running on the surface).

        I don’t think that change is significantly enough to cause issues though.

  2. Looking Good! Since the price of old 360’s are dropping like lead balloons here I might do something similar!

    One thing though, it seems like he sprayed over the RAM chips around the CPU instead of taping them off too? Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe those RAMs must make thermal contact with the heatsink as well. If I remember correctly some of the older 360’s definitely had the RAMs contact the heatsink.

  3. I do not want to bash the work from somee sprayed over the RAM chips around the CPU instead of taping them off too? Correct me if I’m wrong, bone else but serious:

    Painting a motherboard is not the best idea. Some guys covered it already with thermal resistance / dissipation, warranty, ESD and other concerns. It will be also impossible to repair anything because the paint covers anything and the paint will introduce additional problems.

    I highly recommend not to encourage anyone painting pcbs just for fun.

    I also expect the paint maybe be a thermal insulator or introduce any other problems which are not that obvious.

    And I agree with someone else who says I would not expect to see a long life of this mod anyway because it dies quite fast when it gets under stress (thermal for example).

    I also do not expect anyone working with the proper equipment and using ESD protection or anything else, so the expectation of the device is definitly shortened.

    I also recommend some air filters which could be cleaned on the outside. To be honest i did not bother to watch the movie, just a guess that these are missing.

    I also suggest that he adds a wire roll up mechanism as from a hoover so he do not need to plug and unplug the Ac source everytime.

    1. The paint will have an effect on the heat dissipation. Most of the SMT packages including the BGA, those TO-263 power MOSFET are designed to sink a significant amount of heat into the PCB which acts as a heat spreader.

      In a BGA, the chip die conducts heat through the thin substrate (which is a PCB) that has the BGA balls, then onto the PCB which in down the via into the copper power/ground planes. This is a metal to metal path and we are talking about somewhere 30% and up depending on the packaging. Power MOSFET dies are bonded onto a metal lead frame (the big metal tab) that is soldered onto the PCB directly and guess wthere the heat is supposed to go?

      The motherboard itself is a heat sink and people just painted it over as if it were a piece of furniture.

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