Fully Internal Water-cooled Xbox 360 183
NiteStar writes "Dano2k0 created a fully internal water-cooled Xbox 360. Unlike previous water-cooled Xbox 360 mods, this one has everything inside the original Xbox 360 case, including the water reservoir and pump. Both CPU (Zern GPU block) and GPU (Koolance GPU-180-H06 block) are water-cooled, with internal Tank-o-Matic mini reservoir, 12v thermaltake pump and DD fill port on the plexi window. The case itself is also customized with a plexiglass grill and LEDs, and it's fully custom painted. The case mod will also be featured in the next edition of the Official Xbox Magazine UK."
One question: (Score:5, Insightful)
More importantly (Score:5, Insightful)
Unacceptable (Score:3, Insightful)
The whole point of consoles is that you shouldn't need to do bullshit like this. Clearly someone at Microsoft severely fucked up if people are finding it necessary to modify their XBox 360's just so they don't overheat. Once you start having to do all of that all you have is a cheap computer (not ever that cheap) that can't do all the other computer type things.
Failures to understand things like this will ensure that Microsoft never turns a profit in their gaming hardware division and why Nintendo will keep going. Nintendo provides me with an appliance that just works for what it was designed for.
This is of course not to say that doing stuff to consoles isn't fun or worthwhile. I thought the XBox to PC mods were a real hoot, but before this generation, no one has felt the need to mod just to make their hardware work properly (ancient consoles excluded).
Glycol? (Score:3, Insightful)
There are safer things than water to use.
(Wait, alcohol is combustable. Oops. Oh well, he didn't want his house anyway...)
COOL but Illegal? (Score:1, Insightful)
Remember ye olde 'mod chips' that MS went after tooth n nail?
It just strikes me as a wee bit hypocritical to then feature such a blatant violation of the license in an 'official' MS magazine.
Now, I understand that this actual 'change' doesn't affect how the Xbox actually works. But I'd also bet that the license doesn't differentiate between mod'ing a chip and ripping out the innards to display them in your own custom case either. As such, has MS just undermined the legal 'heft' of their license since they allow *some* mods and not others?
Re:Unacceptable (Score:3, Insightful)
There's no *need* to do this, just as there wasn't a *need* to replace a console's orange LED with a blue LED. The Xbox 360 doesn't need this mod to avoid overheating. Mostly it's a bunch of nerds who enjoy hacking at technical things, this is Slashdot after all...
OK I guess it does provide some benefit by being quieter than a fan, but fans are common to other consoles, and computers, as well.
Re:COOL but Illegal? (Score:5, Insightful)
Heating is not the issue for me (Score:2, Insightful)
Oh please (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm sorry to burst your fairytale fantasy, but any other console has been a small computer in disguise too. Your beloved Nintendo or Sony or whatever don't run on magic and pixie dust either, but, guess what? Use a CPU, a graphics card, RAM, etc.
E.g., the Dreamcast had the same graphics chip that was available in PC graphics cards too, a modem that you could have bought on the PC too, off the shelf SDRAM, and generally guess what? It was just a fucking computer in an ugly white box. It even took peripherals like keyboard and/or mouse, or you could buy an ISDN or Ethernet adapter for it. All that it had different was a non-Intel CPU, that's all.
And if the people are willing to pay that, the problem is...? No, seriously. Since when was it a duty to provide everything for free? If they can put a price on something and the market actually pays it, then that's just capitalism in action.
Oh yes, I'm sure that _you_ could single handedly emulate every single game in existance, on a different CPU and a different graphics chip and all. Emulation isn't a trivial affair buddy, and it becomes increasingly problematic because of ever increasing complexity of the system you're trying to emulate. Yes, I'm sure everyone can wave Zsnes as proof that a console can be emulated, but look further up the food chain. It took several teams about 6 years to emulate a PSX acceptably. (But any existing emu still doesn't emulate at least a quarter of the PSX titles well enough!) It took more than 6 years of trying to emulate the PS2, and _still_ noone has more than a few demos and games that make it barely past the start menu, to show for that effort.
So basically, you know, if you're going to proclaim people as idiots for not being able to emulate the XBox, how about proving that you're not exactly as big an idiot? Surely you can get at least the CPU emulated perfectly in real time and at the correct speed on a dual-G5? I mean, come on, you can find the specs for both CPUs online, there's no major secret involved.
The crashes and patches were brought by the companies who coded those games, not by MS. MS's only (debatable) fault was providing a HDD and an online connection, that made patches possible. But blaming every crash or patch on that MS decision is like blaming Boeing for the 9/11. Whatever happened to personal responsibility? If Company A thought it's perfectly ok to shaft its customers with a buggy untested game, surely only Company A is to blame? I fail to see how those providing just the connection or the medium are to blame there.
The 360 hardware is a fucking disaster even if you completely ignore the massive defect rate. It is essentially a 480p system trying to run games at 720p and ending up with jaggy and low frame rate messes.
Sad to burst your bubble, but noone is duty-bound to give you your dream gaming rig for a quarter of the price. Console games have always had to deal with lower specs. Consoles never were some $2000 gaming rig subsidized down to $300 whatever. The question is whether a game can look good enough on that hardware, not what specs you'd consider enough for a "true" 720p machine.
And from what I can tell, a helluva lot of people are actually satisfied with their frame rates in 360 games.
Re:Pull The 360 From The Market, Microsoft! (Score:5, Insightful)
I find it relatively funny that so many people are complaining about the 360 being a 'ticking time-bomb', and that people continue to claim that Microsoft is 'digging their grave' with the faulty hardware. I, beg to differ. While there have been a lot of issues with the console release, there were just as many at PS2 release and no one seems to equate these two situations because Microsoft is some 'horrible evil'. I own a 360 launch console and I have yet to have any issues whatsoever, and I'm not in the minority, either. There are a lot of incidents you hear about where people's 360s are on the fritz and you don't hear about those who are working... And for good reason. Why would someone complain or post on a message board that their XBox 360 is working just fine? You've fallen into the trap of believing only what you see because there is no real need to report on the other side of it. It is just like when something awry goes on in any aspect of the world - you only hear the negative because there is little incentive to report on the positive.
All of my friends and peers that own first generation 360 consoles still have them intact and working with little to no problems whatsoever. I know you hate Microsoft, but making unsubstantiated claims and implying that all consoles are faulty is preposterous. Don't pull the 360 from the market until it is officially broken. There may be issues right now with some consoles, but they're not as widespread as it would appear.
Re:the switch (Score:3, Insightful)
I couldn't agree more! Once you use OSX with the default application set, you realize how limited it is.
I bought myself an Intel Mac Mini about two months ago, and so far I havn't been incredibly impressed with OSX:
* If you want your Mac to output the sound from the line in (audio pass-through), you have to use a third-party application. Windows and Linux have a checkbox that turns this on and off. Funny, this feature used to be available in OS9.
* If you want any themes besides the overly bright (for my tastes) blue or grey, you have to download a 3rd-party theme manager...which century is this again?
* If you want to play an m3u playlist file, both Itunes and Quicktime will cough and die if your m3u file contains backslashes. This is opposed to more robust players like Winamp and XMMS, which will decode m3u files correctly regardless of whether they use "/" or "\" to denote *relative* paths. Even third-party players available for OSX had this issue, so I gave up and went through the painful process of installing X11 and XMMS. I mean, these are *relative* paths, they should work on any file system that supports a directory structure.
And no, I don't want Itunes to import my library and manage my music...I've been doing a good job of that just fine for the last decade. My system is just as easy to use as Itunes is, but with the benefit that I actually KNOW where my music is and how my music is organized.
* The home and end keys go to the start and beginning of the document, rather than the start and end of the line. As a coder, I can tell you, I rely on the home and end keys for my sanity. Apple key + arrow left and arrow right are a clumsy replacement - the whole point of using home and end to do that is you only have to use one hand.
That's not to say I havn't enjoyed getting to know OSX. If I really thought it sucked, I would have used Boot Camp to switch to Windows a month ago. But it is not the utopia that you people make it out to be. For laptops, yes, OSX can be pretty slick, but for desktop users there's no real benefit.
I think the original poster got it right. You are a prime example of user error. Do you know how often I run a virus scanner on Windows? Perhaps once every 6 months, or on the rare occasion when I download a file I can't trust. You know how often I run Ad-Aware? Maybe every 6 months. You know how many viruses and spyware infestations I've had in the last 5 years? NONE.
And if you want to complain about COMPLEXITY...it's not as if these programs are that hard to use. Run the program, let it update automatically, then let it run a scan. It's really easy if you're a responsibe computer user because the scan report will always come up clean. It only becomes complicated if you're the type of person who does stupid things on the internet. Then, you're constantly finding infections and having to fight them off.
People who download tons of software they can't trust without scanning it...people who visit sketchy webpages that have tons of "free" offers that are too good to be true...people who hook their computers to the net without a firewall...people who use old versions of Internet Explorer instead of the latest Firefox or Opera - THESE are the reasons Windows is considered such a mess. The sad thing is, this is terrible behavior REGARDLESS of the OS you use.
If you act responsibly, I %99.9 guarantee you a virus-free and spyware-free Windows experience, even without using tools like virus scanners and Spybot that often. If you are incapable of controlling your own actions on the internet, or you are so parinoid that you have to run multiple scanner suites and update them on a daily basis just to "be sure," perhaps you DO need to hide out on a minority platform that no hackers target.
Re:One question: (Score:4, Insightful)
Other than the "coolness" factor, I don't see where this mod is a necessity. I would not mind it (or a similar mod that replaced the noise of the stock fans)if it quieted down the 360, however. There are times when mine sounds like a harrier preparing for vertical flight take-off. While its not a big deal when I am playing games, it can be annoying when I am streaming video/movies/wm9HD from other machines. I have been wanting to tackle replacing the fans and openening the ducts a bit to see if I can quiet it myself. A smaller replacement for the huge power brick would be welcomed as well.
I may have simply been lucky in that my 360 has never crashed or overheated, but I just don't see a reason for all the quality complaints. Especially from non-360 owners whose only basis is hearsay.
Re:One question: (Score:1, Insightful)