![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- Date:
- Tuesday , January 03, 2006
- Author:
- Steve Lynch
- Google +1
Water Cooled Xbox 360
The world's first water cooled Xbox 360! A full Xbox 360 breakdown that will show you how it is done easily.
Now that this is done, let’s look at the external water cooling unit. We wanted something small—yet powerful— that looks like an extension of the Xbox 360 itself. Shopping around, we found a perfect candidate for the case in the Holmes Compact Ceramic Heater. The heater itself was extremely inexpensive (under $20) and measures only 7”x 6” x 5”. The unit is built to move air through it, albeit for heating purposes, so it made perfect sense that it could fit our needs for an external cooling unit.
We opened the case and found that, other than a large fan shroud assembly, there was almost nothing inside this case to remove. When we saw the fan used in this heater, we initially had hopes of using it in our mod, but we realized that it took up too much room and ultimately didn’t suit our needs…so we chucked it. After removing the ceramic heating unit and fan, as you can see from the pictures, the shell is perfectly suited for this build.
Basically, what we are going to do is take a complete Koolance kit (fan, radiator, dual pump reservoir, control board, AC adapter and LED panel) and fit it into a case that is barely ¼ the size of the Xbox 360.
First, we installed the 120mm fan in the bottom of the case. While I am normally against using hot glue or the likes for mods, the fan fit snug enough that a bit of hot glue in each corner kept the fan securely in place and kept us from using unsightly screws that would have been visible from the outside of the unit. Once the fan was in place, we removed the radiator from the metal box that it was originally housed in and placed the radiator in directly over the screw towers inside the case.
With the radiator in place, we placed four small squares of double sided weather strip on the corners of the reservoir and placed in over the radiator. The double sided weather strip, along with the case’s internal shroud, holds the reservoir in place and allows enough room to make sure the reservoir does not impede air flow.
After we installed the control unit we routed the cooling lines out through the holes where the control knobs used to be. We used compression fittings here as well so that the cooling unit could be separated from the Xbox 360 at these fittings or by using the fittings on the back of the Xbox 360. Next we installed all the needed wiring for power and control of the pumps, and then we wired the AC adapter to the control unit. Using garden variety wire nuts we spliced the AC adapter to the original power cord left over from the ceramic heater.
Once we had the system in a working state, we attached the control board (more hot glue) to the outside of the unit and powered up the system. We ran the unit for a full 48 hours on two of our other Xbox 360 consoles to test for leaks and component failure; everything ran flawlessly even after being uninstalled and installed (three times) into different Xbox 360 test systems.
After we had a completely working system, it was time to address some of the minor aesthetic/cosmetic issues. Let’s take a look at what we did to spruce up the looks and improve functionality.