Is It Safe To Run A 360 Without A Fan Shroud In My Set Up? Options

[Iacon]

I have my jasper mobo housed inside a custom Lian Li aluminum case cooled by two 120mm fans (2x on 12v setting). I replaced the gpu heatsink for a jasper cpu heatsink. The problem is that I don't have the right tools to modify (cut) the aluminum fan shroud so that it can cover the gpu heatsink. I used AS5 for the thermal paste.

*So my question is if I can run my 360 without the shroud and not be damaged?

One fan is located in the back of the case and it sucks the hot air out and the other fan is positioned above the heatsinks blowing air downward on top of them. The case is well ventilated.

Edit: The two smaller chips next to the gpu were also covered by the stock the gpu heatsink. Is it necessary to have the heatsink on top of them?







This post has been edited by Iacon: Jun 14 2012, 08:06 AM

[canyonnehastings]

Is that the LianLi that was made for the 360? I would keep the shroud there if that's true. And if you're going to replace heatsinks, put 1st generation CPU heatsinks on both chips as those are the best out of any of the sinks to date. And to keep the shroud you'd probably need to put a GPU heatsink back on the GPU, if so, use the 2nd gen one. Even though its a Jasper and doesn't really need any of that lol.

You will need some kind of "wind tunnel" effect though since there are no fans mounted directly to the heatsinks to expel air like a normal desktop PC would have.

[Iacon]

Yeah this case is the XB-01 made for the 360. Sweet box if you asked me but some dislike it because its either ugly too big. It certainly has the potential for better cooling though. I really like it.

Yeah I understand what you're saying. I'm thinking though that the 'wind tunnel' is perhaps only necessary in the original 360 case because everything inside is so compressed thus hindering the needed space for ventilation. The original designs of the gpu heatsink were pretty much dictated by the size of the dvd drive otherwise the heatsink could of been bigger.

I'll probably buy a 120mm antec (one or two) this weekend and position it behind the heatsinks to blow the hot air toward the rear one.

I've also heard that the first gen cpu heatsink is the best one. I do have one collecting dust but I swayed from buying another one for the gpu because a copper shim is needed to use it. The gpu isn't fully covered and that's where the shim comes in. The problem is applying the right amount of pressure.



This post has been edited by Iacon: Jun 14 2012, 09:23 AM

[canyonnehastings]

Yeah this case is the XB-01 made for the 360. Sweet box if you asked me but some dislike it because its either ugly too big. It certainly has the potential for better cooling though. I really like it.

Yeah I understand what you're saying. I'm thinking though that the 'wind tunnel' is perhaps only necessary in the original 360 case because everything inside is so compressed thus hindering the needed space for ventilation. The original designs of the gpu heatsink were pretty much dictated by the size of the dvd drive otherwise the heatsink could of been bigger.

I'll probably buy a 120mm antec (one or two) this weekend and position it behind the heatsinks to blow the hot air toward the rear one.

I've also heard that the first gen cpu heatsink is the best one. I do have one collecting dust but I swayed from buying another one for the gpu because a copper shim is needed to use it. The gpu isn't fully covered and that's where the shim comes in. The problem is applying the right amount of pressure.

Ahh alright. Yeah, just remember that the 360 heatsinks were not meant to be passive. Since you've already invested in that case, you might want to go the extra mile and get some bigger aftermarket heatsinks (I know theyre out there, just dont know where). You can definitely get by if you passively cooled the chips with huge heatsinks.

[strapmonkey]

The fan shroud for this case is relatively easy to modify, actually. The aluminum is thin, and easy to cut and bend. You can mend any induced "rifts" with aluminum flashing tape. The biggest difficulty with this mod is that the rivets used to join the plates making up the shroud will loosen if you tweak them too much. I modded my xb01 shroud so much that it eventually fell apart at the rivets, and I wound up making a new shroud from aluminum sheet I had on hand. Just take your time, think about what it is you are trying to achieve with any such mod, measure thrice, cut and/or bend once.

In answer to your original question, with enough air flow, I think it's reasonable to assume that you could run without the shroud at all. The shroud is designed to train the airflow from one fairly sedate Lian Li fan over your components. If you are running two or more fans in your Lian Li case, you should have air flow to spare. You might consider adding sinks to your RAM, the "southbridge" and the HANA (video compositing) chip.

I wrote a rather lengthy post, some time ago, in this forum about the modding of PC heatsinks to fit 360 CPU and GPU. Look it up if you are interested (search for "Shin Etsu" using the search feature for this forum, the post in question is appropriately named and showed up on page 2 when I searched for it).

This post has been edited by strapmonkey: Jun 21 2012, 02:04 AM