PS3 mod with some questions

dyigirl4help

DO NOT DO THIS IF YOUR PS3 IS STILL UNDER WARRANTY and you are not having overheating issues.

Greeting girls and guys, I am a big fan of PS3 and HUGE fan of racing games. I am in my mid 30s so I started with Gran Turismo 1 back in the day. I noticed that my PS3 Slim was overheating when playing the new GT6. I being the DYI kind of person started to look for an answer right away. Well it dawned on me that a rather simple solution was in order; looking at PS3...where does the little fan grab the air from...poor little guy
So I went to work. I took apart my PS3 and my dir-655 router which I no longer use (5ghz wifi support it has not, not to mention closed source weird version of some sort of open-wrt but getting off topic here ) So I made a fan for my ps3 and I also came up with an idea why not put some sensors into the PS3 and while I am at it, boost the wifi range )thus the dir-655 cannibalism.

I used the following items to get the job done ( in case any of you would care to follow my off-the-wall mod)

1. Torx screwdriver ( sadly to get the PS3 opened up, 1 is required, they are
cheap, I paid 7 USD for mine)
2. Cooler Master Excalibur 120mm PWM Computer Case Fan (R4-EXBB-20PK-R0)
3. Corsair Cooling & Lightning kit
4. S wifi cable from the dir-655 along with the middle antenna connection piece& on/off switch from dir adapter
5. Normal 120~240 ->12V 1.5a adapter
6. Black nail polish
7. Soldering iron
8. 9dBi antenna from Amazon, set of 3 costs 9 dollars.

So here is how it went, I opened up the PS3 ( plenty of guides on youtube can be found on how to do this, however if your PS3 is still under warranty I
advise against this! ) I made a round hole on the top part of my PS3 where the fan is (heated round can can melt a nice round hole), and that is where I attached the Coolmaster 120mm fan along with a little dust collection screen. I used the lightning kit to connect the fan to and the lightning kit is connected via a molex-> adapter ( you will have to splice the adapter cable, run a wire of it with the on/off switch, then run a
wire back to the molex, so you can turn your fan off and off without leaving
your chair / bed. I am planning on using the I-Link cooling kit that is in the
pictures, the siver box looking device, which can connect to your motherboard via usb and you could measure the PS3 thermals (up to 4 thermocouples ). Now I can play my favorite game and not worry about my PS3 overheating.

Some notes.
1. Why did I chose this fan, well as you will see in the pictures, it has round holes all around the casing, so I figured if too much air is being pumped into the PS3, the holes will simply let out any extra air.

2. I soldered the wifi antenna at the joint so it would stay up and erect and since solder is a silver color and contains pb40 I used a little black nail polish to finish off the job to make it look aesthetically pleasing (if you do not have any electrical experience, please skip the soldering part as you can really hurt yourself and start a fire. When I solder I always have a small fire extinguisher next to me and a cut off switch for electrical going into the solder. You cut electricity first, THEN you put out any fire, safety is VERY important. I solder anything on a small wooden board which has bathroom tiles on top as they can take any immediate heat and are easy to clean.

3. Here are the final product pictures, I will get around to applying the thermocouple sensors and posting results if anyone is interested in a few days, but I have to prepare blueprints, find out where to place them and decide if I want to reapply thermal paste to my gpu/cpu on my PS3.

My question to you girls and guys is mainly if I wasted my time doing this, if not do you have any suggestions how I could improve upon this? All thoughts, ideas, suggestion positive or negative are welcome and much appreciated and I hope I put this in the right category, if not I apologize to the mods but I am new here and will read the rules and regulations now, as I have some free time. I hope I have met your criteria and I am the kind of person who enjoys passing on knowledge onto others and like a sponge I absorb that which others tell me So good day to the community and thank you for your time in reading this thread.

The Surround Gamer

Nicely done.

Next up: overclock the PS3's cpu/gpu(s)?

john the one

Good work but man that thing is ugly!