Water Cooling The XBOX 360 in a Lian Li XB01 Case

Project Date: June 25, 2010

Okay so why watercool an XBOX simple answer is because we can. More complex answer is because not only does it look cool it adds another dimension to the XBOX 360 and the troublesome red ring of death. I suppose though in reflection the only guys who are going to see it and marvel are your friends..... not a bad reason in itself.

First off lets get down to the bits. Removing the motherboard from the XBOX 360 voids your warranty and leaves you high and dry with replacement should you make a mistake. If you break something you will be out of pocket and in no way do we advocate that you carry out this modification if you have any problem with the above. Once the magic smoke escapes from electrical components you cannot get it back in there.

If you still want to go ahead then I suggest that you look at the variety of motherboard removal guides for the XBOX 360 and follow the instructions with caution. Next get a hold of the Lian Li XB01 case. You may have to order in this case as I understand that they are now getting more difficult to get. If Lian Li XB01 is not available then I am sure a HTPC case could be modified to suit.

We used the following components;

XSPC water block for the XBOX360
D-TEK DB1 Compact pump (same as the Danger Den DD-CPX1 pump I understand)
Our own Radiical small radiator
Tygon R3400 black tubing
and
Our own Radiical 5/16" compression fittings.

Okay pictorial essay now for the assembly as I know you guys like a lot of pictures.

Image One

Prior to setting up the water cooling system in the Lian case we ran our testing of the air cooler and heat pipe assembly partially shown in the image above. The surface temperature of the heatpipe/air cooler assembly was recorded at up to 62 degrees during testing.

Image Two

First the heatpipe and heat sink assemblies covering the CPU/GPU areas will need to be removed. This guide was found to be very helpful for the removal of the motherboard from the original case and the preparation of the motherboard for water block fitting.
http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=430626&seqNum=2

With the air cooling components removed the rest is fairly straightforward.

Image Three

I prefer to photograph any plug in components before disassembly to avoid any missing bits. It is surprisingly easy to displace a cable and mix up plugs when reassembling. If your one of those persons who repair things and have screws left over at the end then it is mandatory to take a few pics.

Image Four

At this point you will have reached the bare motherboard stage. To get here you will need to remove the two X restraints on the rear of the motherboard. It cannot be stressed enough that care should be taken when you prise off the legs of the X restraints. A slip here could mean cut traces and a ruined board. Please refer to the guide (above) to see exactly how the X restraints are removed. Clean off the thermal paste supplied by Microsoft and check the area around the CPU/GPU chips. It is important that non of the original thermal paste is left on the chip surface as it is likely that is has set solidly and would impede contact with the new water block. This would dramatically reduce the effectiveness of your water cooling system. So spending a bit of extra time and care here will greatly reduce problems in the future.

Image Five

Water block fitting involves screwing in eight screws from the underside of the board so first off refer to the guide that came with your XSPC XBOX 360 block and download the PDF file from XSPC.

http://www.xspc.biz/manuals.php

Planning for your build should include a mock up of the parts in place to identify the issues which may arise. In our build we did this some time ago so now all we have to do is assemble the parts. Here is what we did.

Image Six

With our build the radiator fits exactly into the place of the original fan. Other radiators may need some form of adjustment here.

Next we have to prepare the pump. First off the D-TEK pump required a little bit of machining of the threaded inlet and outlet. The problem that we identified here was that the threads of the compression fittings did not have enough thread depth to ensure a tight fitting. There was a small amount of body molding just above the threads that interfered with the compression fitting 'O' ring bottoming directly onto the end of the inlet and outlet ports. So we machined this portion off.

Next we assembled our Radiical Filler port to the pump and we had our filling, bleeding and pumping completed in a small package. We then ran this pump configuration in a test loop to verify that here was no leakage prior to the final assembly.

Image Seven

Tubing out was very simple. The major concerns here were to avoid any tight turns which may collapse over time starving the water block off flow in the process. With none of the auto cut off facilities present in a modern PC being available for the XBOX 360 reliability of function is very important to longevity. No point in going to the trouble of fitting water cooling if the cooling is going to fail due to bad planning.

Image Eight

Filling and bleeding next. We connected a separate power supply up for this phase of the build. This allowed a safe method of checking for any construction leaks. Clearing any bubbles trapped in the lower port of the radiator etc. It is at this time that we can visualize the flow rate as the bleeding process occurs. With the clear tubing used in the test loop mentioned above we were already able to confirm the flow rate so we had no concerns about sufficient flow.

Image Nine

For power access we picked up a guide on the net for XBOX 360 12 volt sources at the DVD player which we were going to tap into for power but decided that a separate power supply would provide a better failsafe. We also have plans to utilize more power for LED's fans, and various other electronics for monitoring etc and did not want to be limited by the Microsoft brick. So looks like the next XBOX 360 project addition will be fitting a Shuttle type power supply to the XB01 making this a one of a kind XBOX 360.

So there you have it the Radiical XBOX 360 water cooling project.