Last updated: 01 April 2005
I recently bought an Xbox for playing music and movies with the excellent Xbox Media Centre, and as soon as I turned it on I realised I would have to do something about the annoying buzzing noise coming from the stock fan. After a bit of research I discovered you could replace this with any standard 80mm fan, so I decided to use one of my spare Panaflo L1As, one of the quietest fans around.
Here's the original fan I pulled out. A proprietary fan about 70mm, and incredibly noisy and buzzy at any speed. A quick look shows it's a Delta. No wonder!
Here is the Panaflo after I attacked it with my Dremel, in order to get it to fit in the space available. The bottom corners are cut off to clear the motherboard and PSU board.
Installed in the Xbox. the bottom corners are attached with standard screws but the top ones are attached with zip ties as they do not line up with anything you could drill holes into. You can see my blue modchip (Duox2) on the left. You can also just see I've blocked off some of the vents on the left with tape. This is to reduce the air flowing in that side (which has no major hot components) and in theory increase the air flowing in the right, past the PSU, HDD (not shown) and CPU/GPU. I'm not sure if it works though!
This is a top down shot with the HDD and DVD installed. I cut out a large chunk from the HDD tray, partly to allow clearance for the fan and partly because I felt it restricted the air flow into the fan. There is actually a piece of transparent plastic (which is almost impossible to see in this photo) that helps duct the air over the CPU heatsink.
I removed the metal grille in front of the fan as it is only there for EMI reduction, and cut out half of the plastic ribs. I also cut part of the top cover away, all to reduce the impedance of the exhaust. A reasonably neat job (which isn't seen as it is at the back of the unit) and about as unrestricted as you can get.
The fan mod has made a huge difference to the noise levels, as the stock one was so attrocious and buzzy. It doesn't run as cool as I would like but it never overheats. I would highly recommend this mod to anyone who wants a quiet Xbox and is handy with a Dremel.
I have also removed both heatsinks and replaced the heatsink compound with Arctic Silver. This made a minor but worthwhile improvement to the temperatures.
In the near future I plan to create a duct to concentrate the airflow better over the CPU/GPU, which may improve temperatures or enable me to turn the fans down some more.
Pangit