So, I was bored, and started looking up software and ISOs for my dreamcast. I eventually came across some overclocking stuff. So I opened up my dreamcast, to see what was inside, and it was....different. There were these 2 metal plates on the 2 big chips with pipes connected to them, going to the fan. It looks exactly like this inside: http://www.gamesx.com/dreamcast/index2.htm . My friend, Atenhouse,who's a big Sega collector, told me he's never seen anything like it before from a US system, and told me to post here on it. The system is dated July 1999 on the bottom, but the board is dated 1998 and says katana on it and stuff. It's a US system, as far as I know, so I don't know if this is odd or not. I wanted to overclock it, but now I'm not so sure. The cooling on it seems a lot better than the US cooling, but if it actually is rare. I'd like to either keep or sell it. If anyone's interested, give me their price. I'll try to have pictures up soon, my dad's gonna recharge his digital camera.
All the first Japanese Dreamcast units had the heatsync pipes but I never knew that US systems had them. It could be rare but we need a US poster to lets us know more. Yakumo
odd, i have an early dc unit and it doesn't have water cooling. Might be a small number of us units that had it.
mine is a september 99 one, so im guessing water cooling was used on the very first manufactured us units. Does anyone know if the water cooled ones heat up more then the regular fan ones or vice versa?
It's not that uncommon to find one of these units. It escapes me now, but there is a way to tell if it was liquid cooled or not from the sticker on the bottom (besides the date). You can also tell if one is by looking through the vents on the side (you'll see metal on the liquid cooled ones and just the plastic fan on the air cooled ones). I've never heard of any overheating problems with either one.
My Dreamcast have this heatpipes system. It's a US one. Look under your Dreamcast, at the bottom of the sticker, there's a number in a circle. If it's a zero, "0", you will most likely have the heatpipes cooling system.
I saw one like this at the thrift shop the other day with 2 controllers and 2 vmus and 3 games. They wanted 35 for it so I said nah. I have 3 US dc's and none are watercooled. I would like to pick one up some time so if you are interested in selling it how much would you want for it. I live in ohio in the US so shipping would be within the US. Please let me know.
Here is some pictures of my Dreamcast: The sticker. It said manufactured august 1999, and we can see the zero in the circle at the bottom, near [NTSC|U]: The metal fan used with the heatpipes system:
