I have read and searched the forums and some tutorials but am still struggling with a fan issue. Here's the background:

Got a v1.6 softmodded Xbox (Splinter save game exploit), I have UnleashX when powered on by tray eject and straight into XBMC (Dec 07 build) when normal power button is used.

I have installed a new 80mm 12v fan (http://www.quietpc.com/gb-en-gbp/products/80mmfans/coolink_80_r) and initially connected it to original fan socket. The XBOX was very quiet and with the temp' settings set to 50c in XBMC all was good (full control over fan speed in settings etc). Then I found out that once out of XBMC playing on a emu (SNES) the xbox shut down (overheating) as the fan speed reduced it's speed to (as I have now found out on XBMC forum) 20% (I'm lead to believe) as specified in XBOX BIOS (which I have no access to change as box is softmodded).

So I tried connecting fan to HDD 12v supply (using supplied inline power connector) and now the fan runs a lot faster (and about as noisy as original stock fan!!) but I have lost control in XBMC to use temp' monitoring or fan control. I seem to be at catch 22 time.

Has someone done the same as above and managed to get a quiet and cool Xbox but purely softmodded.

By the way the fan is set to pull air in (some tutorials recommend this and others mention it makes no difference).

I have also noted some comments about games controlling fan speed so could it be that in my initial install if I had played an XBOX game rather than EMU I wouldn't have got overheating issues?

Cheers

bump...can anyone help

ok, i can't help with the bios stuff as i dont even have mine modded yet (only had it a few days, waiting for usb converter cables...) but i can help with the fan stuff...

1. you really want it taking the air out. regardless of what people are saying, if you have it blowing air in, the air will blow over the heatsink, get warmed up, then just hang around inside the case warming everything up as there's no real way for it to exit the case. if you have it taking air out, it'll create a negative air pressure inside the case which will suck in air from any small holes throughout the rest of the case. then you'll have this cool air flowing over the heatsink and the fan expelling it through the back so as to not heat anything else up. this is why you'll find almost every single PC on the planet has more fans blowing air out than in to the case.

2. you probably know there's no way to control the fan speed by software while it's plugged in to the main psu molex, but you can still have manual control over the speed. you can either get a different fan with speed control and set it to a lower speed, or you can power the fan via the 5v line of the molex instead of the 12v. more info on that is here: http://www.silentpcreview.com/article6-page1.html but basically you wanna connect the molex for the fan in the wrong way round, but if you're using an inline connecter you'd then have to plug the HD in the wrong way round too in order for the HD to continue with it's normal 12v /5v pin locations.

i'm gussing you have something like this? http://www.kustompcs.co.uk/acatalog/1902.jpg in which case, on both 4 pin ends you'd want to swap the yellow and red wire positions. either take out the pins with tweezers or cut the slanted edges off so you can plug them both in upside down. now, the yellow cable will be carrying 5v and the red cable 12v, so the fan will be powered by 5v instead of 10v making it quieter but not necessarily moving less air than the original fan, and the HD should still be getting 12v and 5v on the correct pins (though now coloured yellow & red instead or red & yellow).

there's also the posibility that the fan won't start at all when using 5v, but i've done it to two seperate 120mm fans and they're both fine so ymmv.

Thanks for the reply pepsi_max2k.

After more reading and digging around on these forums I have now turned the fan so it's now sucking air out as standard XBOX does, your sensible words back this up. This alone with quiet fan connected to standard 6v supply didn't seem to me to be generating enough pull to keep the box cool (the stock fan may not be quiet but it is well designed for pulling air out the box). So I plugged the quiet fan into the HDD 12v supply (the adapter came with the fan - http://www.quietpc.com/files/images/products/coolink80.jpg), again this in itself is no good as at full pelt on 12v the fan is still (IMHO) too loud when in XBMC, so I also installed the fan speed control supplied with fan (so it sticks out the top of the xbox), so I can turn the fan down when in XBMC and right back up when playing XBOX games.

Also note that the HDD power adapter with the fan I got sticks out, so with it on the HDD it only just fits into tray and the screw holes had to be extended to get the screws back into hold the HDD.

Thanks again.

do you know what cfm your new fan pulls at various speeds? and also what cfm the original fan does? you'd probably get away with running the new fan slower all the time as it probably pulls the same amount or more of cfm as the original fan at a similar voltage/speed level.

actually... you ned one seems to do about 1.75 cfm per volt, 12.8 at "reduced speed"... any ideas what the original fan does?

EDIT: apparently around 30 cfm, which would be around 17.5 @ stock 7v, so i guess you don't wanna be running your new one too low during load... maybe 80% speed? if you reseated your heatsinks with new thermal interface then you could prolly get away with lower...

edit: if you can find one of these (noctua 80mm), they're expensive (if you got an xbox recently in the UK for £20 you'd end up with a fan 50% of the price of the whole xbox ) but def worth it, ~18cfm (same as stock) @ 10db (half noise of stock fan), or you can do 22cfm (4cfm more) @ 17db (still 2.5db quieter):

http://www.specialtech.co.uk/spshop/custom...cat=0&page=




http://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Components/...productId=28881

that would be my choce of replacement, a little quieter than the normal fan (17.6 db vs ~19.5 db) but pulls more cfm (20.2 vs ~18 cfm).


either that or this one at 19.6cfm @ 15 db though nexus are a much bigger name in cool cooling...

http://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Components/...productId=19864



http://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Components/...productId=15775

that'll do 25cfm @ 20 db, and


http://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Components/...?productId=9951

run it on 5v and it'll do around 13.5 cfm at 11.6 db.

The one I bought http://www.quietpc.com/gb-en-gbp/products/...ns/coolink_80_r does 21.1 cfm and 11db at 12v full speed, along with dial to manually turn speed down it seems ideal (now I have turned the fan around!!). I would recommend it.

I thought about buying another XBOX from GAME at that bargain price (I bought mine a couple of years ago for £100 when they started being discounted a lot) for a backup, but I thought I will buy one of these instead:

http://www.saverstore.com/productinfo/Prod...07&rstrat=1

£30 for 160gb is a bargain and ideal for the XBOX and pretty easy to swap looking at the tutorials. I can mirror what I have on my NAS box music and film wise and start backing up my games to HDD.

Cheers again