Woohoo! Heatsink-o-rama! No issues the past week with my AirPlay either! I think the top will fit back on... I'm sort of used to it being open now though... :congratulatory:
i think ima crack mine open and see if this helps, dont currently have the cash to splash on a new router.
As soon as the casing was put back on the damn thing started losing the AirPort Express again. Without the case it hadn't disappeared for weeks or had any drops while streaming music. I've thrown in a 12V fan running at 9V off the DC-in jack (which is also 12V but the little resistor is dropping the voltage 3V). This thread should be retitled, "Who can pimp out their crap Netgear modem the most?" :triumphant:
Amazing consumers have to add fans and heatsinks for their products to work. Fuck Netgear is shit, I had nothing but problems with them.
gonna heatsink up my hacked bt home hub too, i've got some hdd coolers i could strap on to the netgear and the homehub
Nice! Cool tip! I had one of those suckers, but didn't last long, now I've had a TP-Link for years and can't complain.
The superhubs virgin give out are manufactured by netgear and they get extremely hot, the plastic is warm right now and when my feet are cold I put them on it to warm up.
The superhubs use the Broadcom BCM3390 chip, which gets really hot. The fact netgear made the PCB/housing makes no difference. This is the same for most routers - all the same design, just a different box and firmware. Most router issues are just crappy firmware as the hardware is identical.
Does this particular chip have issues with randomly dropping connection? I've had that happen a lot recently and can't tell whether its Virgin/ISP side or my end with the router.
I have a Lyksys Cisco WRT120N and it would crash at first when I got it needing to be reset at least once a week. Now I never touch it and haven't had problems. I may put some heat sinks on it since it seems to be a bit warm to the touch now. I may do like I do with my consoles that overheat and let it go naked... Where's my T8 TORX driver now?
Hahaha, mine is still going strong. Picked it up and stuck some giant feet on it as well. If I let the fan run at full speed it doesn't need feet as the air going in makes it hover on the desk. My hovercraft is full of eels!
So I decided instead of letting it go naked I'd follow everyone else here and go with heatsink and fan. It gets plenty warm in west Texas so I figured this would be better than just open air passive cooling. Sorry in advance for shitty pictures... The PCB. Not much going on here since this is only a 4 port switcher and wireless N wifi router. The CPU gets pretty hot and the RAM chip isn't far behind that. The heatsink got plenty warm to the touch after being on there for just 2 minutes. Notice JTAG header at top right of heatsink. I may investigate that later. See if it can be of any use for hacking. Complete. I even added a switch to turn the fan off for low loads and such. The fan runs on 5 volts and I was able to find a 6.5 volt source in it with some probing around. The fan blows plenty of air being overvolted the amount it is and I set it up so the fan draws in from the vents in the bottom and blows out the top since heat rises making the airflow, in theory, stronger. We'll see if it lives at this voltage. The air is warm even at low loads. I'll see how warm it gets once I start some torrents and stuff up. Best part is that this is all recycled junk I had sitting around. Heatsink is from unknown source. Fan is from an old Windows '95 laptop. Switch came from some old TV plug and play game PCB. Forgot to say I did all this without powering it down. Even soldered the power wires up hot. :triumphant:
The chip is pretty solid. The superhub just has shitty firmware - its made by netgear (and usually takes them awhile to fix everything). But because virgin media insist on have branded firmware - its always several versions behind the latest netgear one. The old 50mb modems were the best - based on the Puma5 chip, rather than the hot broadcom.
These entry-level, consumer-grade routers aren't really designed for the type of use enthusiasts typically engage in. You should be using a dedicated box as a router, or, failing that, a more expensive router with better cooling and hardware. You get what you pay for, after all.
My friend still owns the Surfboard modem, they were pretty good actually. Then again, anything is better than netgear.
