XBox: Silent Fan doesnt cool, and other queries ...

jumbo

Hello everybody,

I've got a 1.6b (crystal) XBox with an Xecutor 2.6 mod-chip. It had a single big noisy fan and since I want to bring er down the Media Centre route I thought a very clever thing to do would be to install a silent fan. I got myself one of those sharkoon silent fans from peats [http://www.peats.com/cgi-bin/shop/db.cgi?view=1&id=8850&type=6&path=14x122x6522]
and proceeded to mutilate the internals of my xbox and the fan itself so that it would fit.

I was overjoyed when I started up my xbox to hear that it was near-silent. I soon fell into dismay however when I went to the temperature levels in the XBMC control-panel. Slowly but steadily the numbers climbed until they hit something like the 70 mark and my Xbox just shut down :-(

I've tried a few things since then to try to rectify the situation:

o I have tried plugging the fan's power supply directly into the hard-drive power hoping that an increase in voltage might do the trick.
o I have tried the 12v fan mod (grounding the fan directly to the chassis of the XBox - this didnt work at all.
o I have tried unplugging the control-line to see if that has any affect.
o I've tried adding fixtures internally to modify the airflow so that more air is dragged over the CPU.

I think one or two of these may have had some positive effect but not enough that my temp readings stay static. Remember too that I'm getting these readings when the 'box is idling, not playing games or watching videos or anything that would *really* drive it up.

One thing that grabbed my attention was the "fan-speed" setting in the XBMC settings. This was set to about 30% but there was no way to modify it. I did some checking around on the 'net and it seems that this is a setting that's built into your bios. If I want to change this, supposedly I need to get a bios, modify it with a program called XBtool to set the fan-speed and then I need to reflash my XBox with this bios. The tutorial in question is here:http://xbox-scene.com/articles/flash-modchip-evox.php

I couldnt get this to work at all!!! I got several different kinds of BIOSes and none of them would open. XBTool was giving out about some kind of checksum or other - I managed to get a program to infer some kind of checksum from the bios itself (a checksum that apparently wouldnt permit me to rebuild the bios which I think is probably what I need to do to change the fan-speed setting!) but even then I just kept on getting funky errors and just couldnt make it work at all!!!

I dunno, is it even worth going down that route of doing the bios setting at all??? Perhaps I'd be better off doing some other hardware mod (yeuch):
o Find some way of driving the fan off an even higher voltage. Anyone any ideas for that?
o Maybe install another fan - a silent one ... I really dont want to have to butcher my Xbox any more than I already have done :-/ and more fans == more noise which would really defeat my whole purpose in doin it in the first place!!!
o Find some way to drive the fan at full speed without having to set it in the bios. Perhaps there's some way I can hardwire the control-line. Has anyone any idea how this works - is it some kind of pulse-width signal or is it a simple voltage control. Would short-circuiting it do the job - I've tried open-circuit (just leaving it dangling) but that does nothing.

Has anyone any more ideas??? I was doing really well with this whole xbox modding thing and this is the first speed-bump I've hit. I would have thought installing a silent fan would be the first thing anybody would want to do given that the fecker's so noisy. Alas however there is a real shortage of good information on doing this.

I'd also be interested in finding out how to use XBtool on the bioses properly if anybody knows anything about that. I found it really confusing. I needed RC4 codes and perhaps 2BL??? anybody know where to get these???

Thanks all for any help.

cheers,
Rob

zAbbo

You know why the fan is so quite, it moves really slowly, and does feck all.

Get one the moves more air - 11.4 CFM isn't enough imo, at least(least!) 15 CFM

jumbo

zabbo wrote:

You know why the fan is so quite, it moves really slowly, and does feck all.

Get one the moves more air - 11.4 CFM isn't enough imo, at least(least!) 15 CFM

That simple huh! If I got another one of them sharkoon fan's and bolted it on to the back in series with the first one would that do the trick?