Tutorial - Add an 80mm fan to a slim box

In this tutorial I will show you the best method to add a 12v 80mm fan to a slimmed xbox. (standard size slim)

First I placed the fan grill onto the lid and positioned it to where I thought was dead center. I used clear tape to hold it in place so I could see the contours of the xboxs' lid. I used a Dremel to drill the holes for the screws. I went right through the tape.


Next I made the fan hole. I did so by using a small drill bit to make a series of holes about 1mm in from the inside edge. Once ALL of the holes were drilled. I drug the Dremel, drill bit spinning from hole to hole until the piece broke free. I sanded it smooth with 100 grit sand paper, then 150. On the under site of the hole, I used an x-acto knife to shave down the small ridge.(not pictured) If left alone it would "raise" the fan about 2-3mm away from the surface and render the fan screws too short.


Add 1 80mm case fan of your choice. I would suggest going with a higher end fan that move more air. Most of the cheap-o clear LED fans do not push (pull in this case) enough air. Sure, they look great but they tend to fail after 3 or so months. I chose a custom lit black fan. (see tutorial on how to add LED's to any fan) I opted to position the fan so it pulls hot air out, rather than push warm air in.


This picture illustrates just how much clearance you have between the fan and the stock heat sink after this mod is done. Also, if you're using a 3.5in hard drive, you're going to want to position it as far left as you can.



This is a soft-modded version 1.0 xbox. The GPU fan had started getting noisy and melodic. Frankly, it would drive me crazy. Doing this I was finally able to remove that bastard and send it to the junk yard. Since this is a soft-modded slim with no DVD drive, all I use it for is streaming media and running retro emulators.

Idle temps (XBMC dash, Confluence skin):
* GPU-101°
* CPU-95°

After playing Super Mario 64 straight through(surreal 64):
* GPU-110°
* CPU-99(ish)°

After 9 hours of streaming videos, because I forgot to turn it off when I went to work:
* GPU-111°
* CPU-101°