Frustrated by the constant din of his Xbox 360, [Janne Ström] took action. The original case wouldn’t have near enough room for the additional cooling that needed to be installed, so he picked up Lian Li’s XB01 case replacement. He followed the illustrated disassembly guide to get the Xbox stripped down to just its motherboard. He then began fitting his coolers of choice: two massive Noctua NH-U9D0 units originally intended for AMD Opterons. The asymmetric heat sinks are intended for applications like this where dual sockets could make other devices difficult to place. Clearly the hardest part of the installation was applying an appropriate amount of thermal compound and then slowly tightening the hold down screws to guarantee even pressure. The resultant system ended up being quieter than the first camera he attempted to record it with and the attached power supply. You can see a video of it below.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cl-h1AQsZEc]
[via Engadget]
great hack … except a majority of the Xbox 360’s noise doesn’t come from the fans but rather the DVD drive…
Solution to DVD noise is to get a big harddrive and install your games to it. Then the disk is used once to determine legitimacy and you are back to silent operations.
@hal hockersmith
If you wanted the thing to be even more quiet, you could use an SSD instead of a mechanical hard drive.
And to keep the bigger hard drive with games on it from making noise, hot dog it for a solid state drive. ;)
shoot, someone just posted my idea before me. dammit.
Yeah that happens to me so much in life!!!
Unfortunately only certain models of hard drives are compatible due to signatures. Besides, the average game takes up 6GB… and cheap SSDs over 32 GB are crap on speed.
just checked those radiators, they are $70 in my country lol, more expensive than x360
I have been trying to find a direct replacement to the stock heat sinks for months now. the stock holes are 60mm*60mm (at least on mine)I have not been able to find anything to fit those. I never thought about putting a larger one diagonally across the chip. by the way if any one knows of any more heat sinks that will fit the x box I would be very grateful.
not much use in having a quiet xbox if the case is so big you can’t see the tv ;)
i can’t believe lian li makes a case for xbox 360.. microsoft really is bringing consoles down to their level
Quiet does not seem to be the point here, rather all the temp problems should go away.
It’s not like the controllers aren’t wireless and you could move the console farther away from you…
Its a great hack but I think I’ll just move mine to another room and run a couple long CAT6 cable which will carry the HDMI data via a HDMI to CAT6 converter.
PS when is someone going to do a 19″ rack mount Xbox and PS3 with external controller aerial and game disc loader “IDEA” just saw a robot arm for £30 ($50)
A pointless hack.
Better to just go out and buy a 60GB Jasper 360 and install the games to the HDD. Not only will you save on parts but you’ll have a smaller footprint and will ultimately save money on power consumption too. There would also be little point in trying to fit a SSD drive for the reasons already outlined (incompatibility with the hddss.bin configuration) as well as the fact the current HDD is barely heard. Good idea 2 years ago, but not now. MS have finally gotten their act together and are making reliable 360’s (it’s a shame the same cannot be said for Sony’s PS3 – check the Playstation boards for people with issue after the last update!)
Well aren’t you just a little downer… Have you never heard of overkill? it’s a good thing to have. Besides, no matter how quiet the XBOX360 HDD is, it still has moving parts and as such, still makes noise. So no, this is NOT a pointless hack… It’s quite the opposite, a very useful hack. And for people who just enjoy doing things like this, it is a wonderful and assimilating endeavor. For you to say that it is pointless is liken unto saying that the creators of the XBOX it’s self – or any other gaming system for that matter – had no business even working on such foolishness.
I can say its a good try and done well according to hack.
After see this i just say this SUPERB
but has any1 played gta or cod running from install, = poor, the map fails to keep up with the game
Jsut to say that there is no need for this hack now. As said before most of the noise comes from the DVD drive and now with the new NXE dashboard you can copy the data to your hard drive and so there is no need for DVD to run whilst running the game. Though i do have to say that there is still noise from the start up, but that does not last that long at all.
Seen a case mod where a guy installed the 360 guts into a pc case and had it watercooled, was pretty cool
The 360 is optimized to run from a DVD. M$ did so because of the modding of the first Xbox and it’s a two birds with one stone concept, deter modders from pirating games to their HDD’s and also so the games could be played with no lag.
Good trick.
There are so many others trick that can be use too…but its a nice effort.
HI THERE I WILL GO OUT AND BUY A INTEL 320 GB SSD THEN I WILL NEVER LOSE OR CAN I USE A WESTERN DIGITAL 300 GB VOLOCI-RAPTOR AT 10,000 RPMS OR SEAGATE 15,000 RPM CHEATA HARD DRIVE