Project: Silent Xbox (passivly cooled heatsink replacements, etc.)
#61
sounds like you need another brand yes
#62
Not sure if it's of any help, but I just removed the fans, etc out of my box. I put a decent ebuyer fan in the back (run at 19 decibels), and put a zalman passive heatsink in it's place...

I have my fan on at 10% and both the cpu and gpu run at about 45-47 degrees!
#63
What sort of temps do you get playing games or something like the 3d screen saver running? mine seems to go up in the 50s and even 60s!

I know cooler the better... but whats cut off on a PIII chip temp wise?
#64
Just done some more testing.... the 80mm fans when connected to the mainboard definately spin alot slower when games are played.... half hour of Doom 3 and the CPU was at a finger melting 72c and and the GPU in the high 60's!

Anyone else see these sort of temps? boxes with the M$ fitted fan which I believe is 60mm but seems to shift a whole load more air never hit these sort of temps... Huh
#65
Hello. My first post here. I've been a longtime XBMC fan and, yes, I've donated. Smile

I've been following this thread and it inspired me to do the 80mm fan mod as I use XBMC every day. I bought a Noctua NF-R8 80mm fan here and fitted it connected to 5V. When I first turned it on it was virtually inaudible. I had XBMC auto fan control turned on, set to 55 degrees, and I couldn't believe how quiet it was. However, watching the temps rise, even when just sat on the start screen doing nothing was worrying and when the GPU hit 55 degrees (and sometimes before) the xbox would hang. Sad I tried this a few times with the same results every time.

As an experiment I set the fan to constant 40% and this does appear to keep the GPU around 50-55 but it doesn't crash the xbox but is noticably louder. Saying that, its still an improvement on the stock xbox fan.

I dont quite understand why my xbox crashes when it reaches 55 degrees when on auto fan speed but not on constant fan speed even when hitting the same temps? I didnt think 55 was exactly a critical temperature? (other peeople have reported hitting 70 degrees. And how come it can sit at 55 degrees without crashing when on a constant fan speed of 40%?

I was hoping to display the current fan speed on screen. Does anybody know a way to do this?

Many thanks in advance.
#66
Well, I discovered the "Info" feature on the start screen of XMBC and that shows me that when on auto fan speed the fan is running at 4%. Hmmmm... I dont understand it runs at 4% when it needs to be running at over 40% to achieve reasonable cooling. No wonder it is overheating. Can XBMC not control the fan speed with a replacement fan? Or have I done something wrong?

ps When I said I was using 5V I meant 7V (power taken from the motherboard).
#67
Well, for the past few weeks I've been obsessed with making my Xbox run as quiet as possible. I've made various findings which I thought I would pass on. I'm now at the point where my Xbox is what I would consider silent and I am very happy. If I put my ear within 30cm of the case I can hear a smooth hum but if I am sat on the sofa 1.5m away the Xbox is completely inaudible. Smile

First thing I did was replace the 3.5" stock HD with a 80Gb 2.5" Seagate Momentus as the stock HD was really noisy. Inspired by this article on silentpcreview I suspended it with elastic cord in the 3.5" plastic bay. I had to cut some extra holes to hold it in place but in general it wasn't too tricky a job. It really works too! I stream all my media from a NAS so lack of HD idle noise was the most important factor to me and the HD suspension eliminates it completely. Even when churning away doing seeks I still can't hear it.

I've got 2 different Xboxes, a 1.2 and a crystal 1.6 and I've been experimenting with them both with different combinations of fans to achieve the quietest Xbox I can. I found the 1.6 crystal runs slightly cooler than the 1.2 box so this is the box I chose to concentrate on to try and achieve silent nirvana.

I bought 2 fans to experiment with. The first being the Noctua NF-R8 80mm fan which isn't a bad fan but although the airflow specs claimed by the manufacturers are quite impressive at 31 cfm it didn't seem to cool as well as i had hoped. Doing some research on the net I discovered an article on silentpcreview which confirms similar findings.

The second fan I bought was the Nexus Real Silent case fan. I bought this fan because silentpcreview reckon it is the quietest fan on the market. I tried this fan in both of my Xboxes and initially I thought I had a duff fan as the thing was pretty noisy. It had horrible resonant frequencies which would phase in and out at different fan speeds. On 40% speed there were nasty frequencies which stuck out yet at 50% the frequencies would be less prominent yet the fan would be slightly louder overall. I couldn't understand what was going but one day I took the fan out of the case when it was still running and the sound went away. As soon as I touched the fan on the metal RF shielding of the xbox case the noise came back. It was then I realised the nasty noises were due to vibration and in essence the Xbox case was acting as a big sound board. Adding to this, if I lifted my xbox of the wooden shelf it was placed on the vibration noise would almost disappear too.

My next step was to try and eliminate the vibration from the case and in retrospect I went about it the wrong way. I tried to find some way of dampening the vibrations from the case by sitting the Xbox on some dampening material to soak up the vibration. I tried everything from bubble-wrap to carpet and nothing worked. Eventually, I found these sorbothane feet on eBay and tried them underneath. Even though these feet did an amazing job of soaking up 90% of the vibration I was still not happy with the noise my Xbox was making so I decided to treat the vibration at the root of problem : the fan.

Being well impressed by the sorbothane (a "viscoelastic material recognized for its vibration and shock absorption characteristics") I bought a small sheet of the stuff from britishaudio.co.uk. I put a small amount of this (a square 1.5cm wide) in the center of the fan between the metal RF shield and the fan and secured it with 2 cable ties. I also put a small amount under the fan. The results were absolutely amazing. Once secured in place with the sorbothane the fan was virtually silent at 50% speed. I can just hear a light whoosh when I put my ear to it.

If anybody has got their fan directly touching the metal section of your case I highly recommend putting something between the fan and the metal to soak up vibration. Apparently lino will do a good job too.

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Project: Silent Xbox (passivly cooled heatsink replacements, etc.)0