Hey guys, Today I'm going to be showing you how I did my 360 slim fan mod.
Please note that if you use a 120mm fan then you will NOT have room for your dvd drive, although this doesn't affect me, as my case mod will have a separate shelf type thing for my dvd drive to sit on inside the case.
Okay, on to requirements;
1x Large PC fan (120mm for me) I used 4 pin molex fans for this, it made it much easier.
2x Smaller fans (I used 40mm)
1x Hot glue gun
1x Soldering iron
Start by disassembling your xbox,
I will not be covering this as there are thousands of tutorials on this.
Alright, now you want to take your stock fan, and unplug it, take off the old fan shroud.
Cut the red and black wires as close to the fan blades as possible to give you some length to work with,
As for the Yellow and Blue wires, one is a sensor which just observes the fan spinning, and the other throttles the speed of the fan, as these are both now useless, you can cut these off,
if you don't wish to cut the wires, a good tip that Rodent posted in his tutorial on modding your fan to run at 12v was that if you take a small screwdriver, you can pry up the plastic tabs and simply pull the wires out.
I recommend cutting the red and black though to give you more room to work with.
Next, You want to take a look at the fan you have, if you are using molex powered fans as I am, All you need to do, is observe the numbers of the pins on the plastic casing of the male molex connector (1234)
Your First pin is your 12V(HOT) and the second pin is the Ground (GND)
The 120mm fan I chose had its own speed control switch, but seeing as we are modding it for the purpose of cooling, it would be redundant not to have it on high at all times.
If you aren't very experienced at soldering, I recommend twining the wire into a loop, heating up the pin first and then touching it with solder, it makes it alot easier.
Red to 12V(HOT)
Black to Ground (GND)
Alright, now give it a little test, you will have to lift up the fan initially to stop the blades from hitting that heatsink where the old fan was.
Attach the fan to the casing using double sided tape, it doesn't vibrate, and it holds strong. as an added measure, you could use a piece of dowel or something similar to hold the fan up in case the double sided tape fails, however, I have had mine taped for months with no slip ups, and it is also in an awkward position to put a post of sorts underneath it.
As an additional step, I found out that the main airflow was coming under the dvd drive and up to the old fan, but since I didn't have my dvd drive inside the consoles shell, this gave me an opportunity to move some stuff around...
I took the internal speaker out, cut off the plastic tabs and mounted it on the top of the frame with double sided tape
If you are using 4 pin Molex fans like I am, they commonly have a male and a female connector, so you can essentially run one off the other off the other and so on. (You can also see the little speed selection switch I spoke of earlier double sided taped to the side of the fan)
Next I used a hot glue gun to stick two 40mm fans together, similar to the xbox elite style cooling fans I suppose,
I then cut a roughly 40x80mm hole in the mesh, I did this by using a drill to make a larger hole, then used tin snips to cut all the way round.
These fans Are intake fans, they pull cold air into the console, and then the main fan pushes it out.
If you use brushless fans like I did, you will find that it can make a very annoying noise that is quite loud, from the fans vibrating on the metal, you can counter this with rubber, I used an old bike tube.
As you can see, this is the finished result.
I have no means of checking the temperature my consoles running at, but I can tell you now it only emits cold air, and has never heated up, even after 6+ hours game time, so it's pretty damn cool in there
[EDIT] Hot glue can be used to secure wires down and keep things tidy!
I hope this helps/inspires you guys to do some awesome projects, please let me know how your project goes and if this tutorial has helped you!
Thanks
