Slashdot Mirror
Water Cooling an Xbox 360
An anonymous reader writes "HardOCP has done it once again. They have an article running down the process of water cooling an Xbox 360, and with surprising effectiveness and remarkable styling." From the article: "We had plans to water cool an Xbox 360 for over a year now. Little did we know that not only will this water cooling project be more fun than the original, but it may even be practical. Imagine that. With reports of heat related issues and a heat sink that can get almost too hot to touch after marathon gaming sessions, the Xbox 360 water cooling project now had a sense of purpose. We bought a retail Xbox 360 specifically for this project. The minute we got it back to the [H] labs we tore into it and, with a little help from the fine folks at Koolance, we have put together a water cooling solution that will handle anything the Xbox 360 can throw at it and literally knock your socks off." Actual implimentation with hand-holding. Hexus.net was discussing a kit to do this a few days ago.
How about a small fan or maybe, just maybe, not shoving the whole thing into a tiny space with no ventilation.
The editor beat all of us to the punch by pre-empting our cries of "Dupe!".
War isn't about who's right. It's about who's left.
Why do modders always go compete ape shit over stupid stuff like this? I have an Xbox 360 and it works. It just works. No it doesn't have water cooling. I also did case mod it, and it still works! Yes, some people have had problems. Just don't put the power supply in a bad place and you'll be fine. Water cooling for PC's may make sense because there are different types of PC's. Right now an Xbox 360 is just a 360, and if you follow instructions and have a bit of common sense, you'll be fine. It either plays the game or it doesn't. A water cooling system isn't just unecessary, it's stupid.
A game console that benefits from being water cooled, have its power supply dangled from a string, and can't even be slightly moved while there is a disk inside smacks of terrible industrial design. This is not a console, it's an unweildy, ill-conceived, ill-executed beast that seems to actually hate its users.
People say Apple users blindly ignore any and all flaws with Apple products, but Apple users have nothing on XBox fanboys. The thing could spew out radioactive mist and they'd still be forgiving Microsoft because OMG teh grafix are teh r0xx0rz!!!!11
With what, water pressure?
*grumblegrumble*
vk.
If 'almost too hot to touch' is below the specs for the processor's operating temperature range...it doesn't matter how hot it feels to the user.
It never ceases to amaze me how people with no training will second-guess the basic competency of others with degrees in their field. Yes, the power supply gets too hot if placed on a rug...but that doesn't mean the xbox itself isn't designed properly. Probably just means that they didn't do a lot of testing in people's homes with the bricks on rugs and such; from what I understand, the problem is pretty rare even if you don't "cool" the brick.
I also love the egotistical "we drive 'em hard" implied in the "marathon gaming" bits- as if they're HARDCORE users who STRESS the xbox beyond its limits. I guarantee Microsoft had units running benchmarks/game demos for WEEKS at a time doing burn-in...
Please help metamoderate.
Prescriptionist? WTF are you talking about? When you preface a figure of speech with "literally", what you're saying is "(figure of speech) occurred, and I don't mean that as a figure of speech". Nobody's fucking socks got knocked off, so "literally" is the wrong fucking word.
They: the writer, editor, webmaster, etc.; essentially the collective group of people who had the opportunity-- nay, the responsibility of proofreading the material. But they are clearly not entirely literate.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
. . . and the water cooling your car's internal engine is cooling the intake manifold, then the heads and then the block. Many times the amount of heat that you're dealing with in any PC power supply(according to howstuffworks, a gallon of gasoline contains the equivalent of 60 kilowatt hours worth of energy. If you're burning a gallon of gasoline per hour, you need to dissipate at least 75% of that much energy in waste heat. That's downright scary, considering that expansion/contraction needs to be constrainted to a couple thousandths of an inch for any given moving part!
Why do I mention this? As a comparison - cooling them in series isn't that big of deal when you're talking about a 180W power supply and 3/8" tubing, and ANY type of radiator to actually dissipate the heat. Given restrictions introduced by typical automotive thermostats, the effective flow for coolant in an automotive system won't be much better than the 3/8" tubing used in the XBox cooler for this article (in fact the auto thermostat is designed to restrict water flow, both to increase heat transfer and to help prevent the pump from bursting the radiator at high RPMs).
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
They failed a simple power brick...
Typical Slashdot piss-on-Microsoft attitude. Microsoft likely had no part in designing the power brick; for one, they don't have the expertise to design an active-PFC swtiched-mode high-wattage power supply.
Now, we can certainly fault Microsoft for not testing their vendor's product sufficently, but the fact is that 95% of XBOX 360s are chugging along perfectly fine.
If you own a Xbox 360 you will quickly realize how loud the two case fans are. The liquid cooling modification if done properly will make a huge difference in the noise level provided you can remove, replace, or slow down the stock fans.
This is not an uncommon comment. However, consider that most fridges have to work very hard to keep even lukewarm contents cool. The fridge that you linked to would burn out with a "warm" object inside of it because the thermostat would be running the refridgeration cycle continuously due to the heat given off by the xbox.
I should be able to leave my xbox 360 on overnight without having to worry about it overheating, and I shouldn't have to resort to water-cooling the 360 to ensure it operates properly.
You can and you don't. Seriously, don't believe everything you read (including this, I guess).
There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion. -- Francis Bacon
Typical Microsoft-fanboyism.
The moment Microsoft puts any component into a box that has the label "Microsoft" on it, they are responsible.
Yeah, I know, for the typical "it's not Microsoft's fault" - apologist, reponsibility is a strange and alien concept.
But essentially it comes down to this:
It doesn't matter wether Microsoft had a part in designing the power brick.
They are responsible to make sure the thing works. Yes, that means if some supplier screwed up it's still Microsoft's repsonsibility to do some minimal quality control so that the broken units don't get shipped.