Wii w/o fan

Not a tech, I was a moderator at wiihacks.com - so a few came via there as repairs for people. But most of them where from me buying pallets of broken Wiis as faulty. I would unbrick them and sell them out in parts. At peak I was charging:

£49.99 for a Bootmii as boot2 capable motherboard
£24.99 for the dvd drive chassis (laser, motor etc, but no logic board)
£19.99 for DVD logic board compatible with modchips
£7 for bluetooth module
£5 for wifi module

Then selling various covers and flaps. I was paying about £9 per console on average in bulk lots. Needless to say, I made a fair amount of money, which is one of the reasons why I have a £1k chip programmer.

I still have a couple of boxes full of motherboards that didnt have the boot1/2 exploit that were unrepairable for chip spares (like the AV encoders and sd card sockets) in my garage. I should throw them away really, as the Wii is worthless now. But it was good while it lasted.

 

Dreamcast definetly needs a fan, even when I had one Dec of 99 I remener how hot it would get and in such a small space stuff can easily warp or over heat. 32bit was last era when fan wasn't needed but chips weren't running that hot at the time.

Wii on the other hand had an issue where some would overheat when console was off cause fan didn't kick in when doing auto update while off.

I know the saturn was originally going to use a fan but they figured out it didn't need it but left on the molding of japanes launch units. Interestingly Japanese Dreamcast launch units used liquid cooking but they stopped after initial run and switched to regular fan.

 

I don't think it used liquid cooling. It used heat block with piping that lead to the fan. Besides, the casing is too small to hold a reservoir.

 

Yeah but afaik there's liquid in those pipes to help speed up the heat transfer. One could say it's a kind of passive liquid cooling.

By the way you shouldn't feel bad about starting this thread. You're young and curious and you experienced with consoles to see if they could run without a fan, nothing wrong there as far as I'm concerned, only a little risky to break your own console. But hey it's yours!

However, you should really take into consideration what people are saying: powering a console without a fan isn't a good idea. Even if "it just works", you're certainly reducing the lifespan of the consoles. If you really want to do a fanless mod, you'd have to look into using heatsinks and maybe changing the parts that create most of the heat by modern ones. E.g. you could look into replacing the DC internal psu for a picoPSU or dc-dc boosters, or simply put a fan that's quieter.

 

Oh! That seems very weird.

Yes. I am a very curious man

Yes I just realized. Heat is a definite no no. I have learned my lessons. I can still experiment some how like what I did with my N64 and put an Ouya heatsink in it and a northbridge heatsink from a Dell Dimension C521 that I found somewhere.

 

Leave the fan, it's not loud anyways.

 

I keep my Wii on a shelf with games stacked tight left and right due to space restrictions (i.e very little airflow), and it has always worked fine. I do however put less valuable games left and right though as they get quite warm

 

I've heard of adding fans, but removing? oh well, whatever floats your boat

 

Sounds like a great idea. Next remove the power source because who needs that as well.

 

It is necessary! I have also learned my lesson.

 

I don't have a scanner soa hi rez picture have to do. NEXT-GEN Magazine way back in 1999 did a tear down of a early DC. You can see it clearly had liquid cooling.

 

It isn't liquid cooled. Just because it has pipes doesn't automatically rule that its liquid cooled.

 

I'm sorry but do you know how to read? It says right on it.


Again this was first run consoles that had this.

 

-_- It was an error. Do you know how liquid cooling works? You need a radiator, a reservoir, and a coolant fluid. Its too small to have a reservoir in the casing and there isn't any liquid in the pipes and if there were, there would be multiple reports of corroded Dreamcast motherboards. Multiple people on various forums, including myself, has confirmed its heat piping. Besides, its nothing too exciting or revolutionary. PS3, Xbox360, PS4, Xbox One all use heatpipes. Hell, even my Dell XPS One from 2007 has heatpipes:

 

Stop being a troll. Jesus you can't read what's in front of you make topics like this post every other post. expert my ass. ignore list you go

 

I am an expert. You are the one being a dumb ass not me.

 

Early DC systems used heatpipes, not water cooling. Heatpipes can contain liquid but it's a completely different technology. Heatpipes merely transfer heat while actual cooling is still done by air. There's no liquid flow.

Back to the topic - Wii definitely needs a fan. Back to that hell summer of 2010 in Moscow we had Wii hang several times before i simply put a fan on top of it. And it was nothing too extreme, just +39C in the room. Also there's a lot of problems with external HDDs or NAS units which don't have fans, you have to use something like this:

It's 120mm fan cooling the external Seagate drive and additional 80mm fan cooling WD NAS. Looks crude but does the job very well, almost silent (resistors), much better than 1 120mm fan at full speed cooling both drives, and very easy to clean since fans aren't attached to anything. And yeah i keep that polyethylene film for a reason - i put 2.5" external HDDs there so they won't slide (not all external drives have rubber pads), and it will take a lot longer for that NAS to yellow (less UV).

 

Man,this thread is very amusing.

Just remember if you think your the smartest person in the room than your obviously in the wrong room.

 

This has ran it's course now.