Hey guys,
We all know the Nyko intercoolers are to a certain degree a waste of time... Whether they be the USB vesion (which I highly recommend using over the in line version) or the 12 volt in line version, these style intercoolers just don't really do what they are marketed to do in the first place... In practice they dont really work, but in theory... it gets even more interesting.. they are a bottleneck in the airflow situation. Imagine for example my brand new Volkswagen Polo GTi. from factory, the exhaust is ok, and flows enough for the stock parameters. But the reason it doesnt make as much power as a modified GTi is because it has a few things in its exhaust pipe to slow down the escaping air. a resonator, catalytic converter, and probably some other 'dampeners'. When you get rid of these dampeners, and get the air flowing faster, you get better performance, and more effecient temperatures for the turbocharger. We all know that hotter air going in and coming out of a turbocharged engine equals less performance... On top of upgrading your exhause, you would be soilly not to upgrade your air intake as well, to compliment the out flow. And this is where I can assimilate VBW GTi's with xbox 360's... They both are machines which need to have effiecient cooling methods for longevity, and overal performance.
So, with the theory set out up there and the knowledge base I have gained from reading posts in this forum, I have come up with a useful way to employ any of the 'Nyko' Style Intercoolers. My aim was to get as good airflow INTO the 360 as I was getting OUT the rear end.
I had already gotten the Whisper Legacy fans to replace the stock microsoft ones, but did not employ the buzz switch for overkill airflow. The reason being is that I have a blaster 360 and the Legacy switch needs to tap into the DVD drives power supply which already has a modyfied cable for the blaster.. (im sure there is a work around - happy to hear any thoughts) I noticed a vast increase in airflow with these fans, and also, the case (a clear case off ebay for $36 Australian.. a bargain) was getting MUCH hotter to the touch than when I had the stock fans in... The whisper legacy MUST have been moving the hot air out more effeciently, but I had to cut out the plastic near the rear exit of the fans so that the fans could transfer the heat to the open air, and not the plastic, which would cause a decrease in performance.. As soon as I cut out the area around the exit of the fan out take, the temps of the case itself dropped SIGNIFICANTLY! Som anyone who is buying an aftermarket case, beware, in my experience, the plastic is not the same quality as the microsoft plastic, and gets much hotter (but as I stated, this is easy to alleviate, just use one of those electric gun things that you can pout the different tips on... slices through the plastic like butter... ask aty any hardware store, they will point you in the right direction)
SO, now to the intake. I noticed that most air was being pulled into the 360 from the right hand side (Or bottom if you stand it up, which I dont) so naturally this is probabvly the best place to position a fan or group of fans to push some cold air in.. basically ram effect cold air induction.. (Never thought I could use my mechanical aptitupe to an electrical device... im a little chuffed guys if you cant tell.. lol) I saw on different sites, and on this forum that you can get the XCM fan kit which sits on top or around the CPU, and from what people are suggsting, it makes a significant difference... So I thought stuff it... I know how useless the Nyko is as an Intercooler, why not turn the fans around, and mount the bugger on the bottom and cause it to PUSH air in. This PUSHING of air, in combinationm with the PULLING of the air from the legacy whispers, has created a machine that to the touch doesnt get the warm at all.. I mean seriously, it makes a bit of noise.. but it MORE than pays of with the amount of heat it dissipates. The cooler is very easy to take apart, just a small flat head screwdreiver to take out the switch, and some screws here and there for the fans, and you have yourself a cold air induction kit.
Once it is apart, pull the fans out, and just simply swap them around to face the opposite direction. Then feed the cables up toward the rear where the PSU connects in. If in the dismantlement process you have pulled the wired off the switch... its ok, there is enough solder blob on there to strip a bit of plastic off the wires and wrap it back around and give it a little solder to make sure it sticks.. dont just wrap the wires and hope for the best.. it wont work, and will prbably cause some sort of problem.
Here is a couple of pictures to start off (I tried posting pics but it wouldnt let me
..
This is the type of intercooler I am talking about:
http://img535.imageshack.us/img535/633/73203260.jpg
This is the way the fans come. Just plain black from the inside (at least in my case), you should pull them out after unscrewing each one, and put it back in so that the label is facing toward you.. reminds me of a claymore mine... they actually have written on them - Face Toward Enemy, but I digress... You want the fans to pull air INTO the xbox not OUT of it.:
http://img202.imageshack.us/img202/8428/fansinsertedcorrectlyno.jpg
This is what you will see in terms of wiring, pretty easy stuff, just make sure negative (Black) goes to the off side of the switch, and the Positive side (Red goes to Pos) is on the on side of the switch:
Re-wiring the switch is probably the hardest
Now this next step is probably the hardest thing you will encounter. Plug the six pin male PSU plug into the box, by this stage as stated earlier, you will have fixed the swith, put some electrical tape in any exposed areas to make sure you get a viable current flow (and for safety as well), then position the intercooler over the bottom panel to a position where it can 1. have the wires easily clear the end to the PSU, 2. look at where the little stubbs located on the bottom of the intercooler frame are touching the bottom panel.. the stubbs are a little bigger than the holes on the panel. therfor we need to make a couple of slight modifications.
* First off, get a sharpy, and look at all the stubbs (on the intercooler frame) and holes (on the bottom panel of the box), and figure out which position would be the best for clearence, and also make sure its a position where you need to make the LEAST amount of cutting to get the stubs to fit in. Mark these holes with the sharpy (oil based pen, good for plastic).
* I was lucky enough to get nearly 4 of the 8 stubbs to go into holes (which i needed to enlarge). Again, pull out the handheld plastic butter knife (thats what I call it) and go to work cutting off the stubbs off of the cooler you no longer need, and make holes bigger if necessary for the stubbs which will fit into the template you made earlier with your sharpy.
Heres a pic of the holes I made:
http://img594.imageshack.us/img594/2131/bottompanelwithholesenl.jpg
So once you have that and you have a good fit, your basically home and hosed. I guess if it isnt a great fit, you could use some Blu-Tac to reinforce the fitting, but generally you should be able to get a good fit. Im sure a USB version would be safer to use, but I dont have access to one, so i dont know if its easy enough to just open one up and switch the fans around. Heres some final pics1, the first one shows that the wiring is a little yucky to look at, but when its in its hidy hole, no one can see it, ALSO note that I have cut out the plastic around the fan Outlet at the rear as this plastic was a heat transfer nightmare... could cook an egg on top of the box.. Any suggestions on how to clean it up would be appreciated, and the last pic is of the Xbox running with the fan attached:
http://img830.imageshack.us/img830/7916/faninstallednoteoverkil.jpg
And finally!!!!:
http://img189.imageshack.us/img189/7898/fanattachedandrunningni.jpg
So there you go guys, if any of you have one of these monsters which are NOT any good as an intercooler... I suggest 1. Bite the bullet and upgrade your internal fan to a better quality item, and 2. If you want to lower temps EVEN more do this cold air intake mod.
Mods feel free to sticky this if you think its worth anything, of course with added suggestions if applicable!!
Cheers guys,
Be good.
TPR
We all know the Nyko intercoolers are to a certain degree a waste of time... Whether they be the USB vesion (which I highly recommend using over the in line version) or the 12 volt in line version, these style intercoolers just don't really do what they are marketed to do in the first place... In practice they dont really work, but in theory... it gets even more interesting.. they are a bottleneck in the airflow situation. Imagine for example my brand new Volkswagen Polo GTi. from factory, the exhaust is ok, and flows enough for the stock parameters. But the reason it doesnt make as much power as a modified GTi is because it has a few things in its exhaust pipe to slow down the escaping air. a resonator, catalytic converter, and probably some other 'dampeners'. When you get rid of these dampeners, and get the air flowing faster, you get better performance, and more effecient temperatures for the turbocharger. We all know that hotter air going in and coming out of a turbocharged engine equals less performance... On top of upgrading your exhause, you would be soilly not to upgrade your air intake as well, to compliment the out flow. And this is where I can assimilate VBW GTi's with xbox 360's... They both are machines which need to have effiecient cooling methods for longevity, and overal performance.
So, with the theory set out up there and the knowledge base I have gained from reading posts in this forum, I have come up with a useful way to employ any of the 'Nyko' Style Intercoolers. My aim was to get as good airflow INTO the 360 as I was getting OUT the rear end.
I had already gotten the Whisper Legacy fans to replace the stock microsoft ones, but did not employ the buzz switch for overkill airflow. The reason being is that I have a blaster 360 and the Legacy switch needs to tap into the DVD drives power supply which already has a modyfied cable for the blaster.. (im sure there is a work around - happy to hear any thoughts) I noticed a vast increase in airflow with these fans, and also, the case (a clear case off ebay for $36 Australian.. a bargain) was getting MUCH hotter to the touch than when I had the stock fans in... The whisper legacy MUST have been moving the hot air out more effeciently, but I had to cut out the plastic near the rear exit of the fans so that the fans could transfer the heat to the open air, and not the plastic, which would cause a decrease in performance.. As soon as I cut out the area around the exit of the fan out take, the temps of the case itself dropped SIGNIFICANTLY! Som anyone who is buying an aftermarket case, beware, in my experience, the plastic is not the same quality as the microsoft plastic, and gets much hotter (but as I stated, this is easy to alleviate, just use one of those electric gun things that you can pout the different tips on... slices through the plastic like butter... ask aty any hardware store, they will point you in the right direction)
SO, now to the intake. I noticed that most air was being pulled into the 360 from the right hand side (Or bottom if you stand it up, which I dont) so naturally this is probabvly the best place to position a fan or group of fans to push some cold air in.. basically ram effect cold air induction.. (Never thought I could use my mechanical aptitupe to an electrical device... im a little chuffed guys if you cant tell.. lol) I saw on different sites, and on this forum that you can get the XCM fan kit which sits on top or around the CPU, and from what people are suggsting, it makes a significant difference... So I thought stuff it... I know how useless the Nyko is as an Intercooler, why not turn the fans around, and mount the bugger on the bottom and cause it to PUSH air in. This PUSHING of air, in combinationm with the PULLING of the air from the legacy whispers, has created a machine that to the touch doesnt get the warm at all.. I mean seriously, it makes a bit of noise.. but it MORE than pays of with the amount of heat it dissipates. The cooler is very easy to take apart, just a small flat head screwdreiver to take out the switch, and some screws here and there for the fans, and you have yourself a cold air induction kit.
Once it is apart, pull the fans out, and just simply swap them around to face the opposite direction. Then feed the cables up toward the rear where the PSU connects in. If in the dismantlement process you have pulled the wired off the switch... its ok, there is enough solder blob on there to strip a bit of plastic off the wires and wrap it back around and give it a little solder to make sure it sticks.. dont just wrap the wires and hope for the best.. it wont work, and will prbably cause some sort of problem.
Here is a couple of pictures to start off (I tried posting pics but it wouldnt let me
This is the type of intercooler I am talking about:
http://img535.imageshack.us/img535/633/73203260.jpg
This is the way the fans come. Just plain black from the inside (at least in my case), you should pull them out after unscrewing each one, and put it back in so that the label is facing toward you.. reminds me of a claymore mine... they actually have written on them - Face Toward Enemy, but I digress... You want the fans to pull air INTO the xbox not OUT of it.:
http://img202.imageshack.us/img202/8428/fansinsertedcorrectlyno.jpg
This is what you will see in terms of wiring, pretty easy stuff, just make sure negative (Black) goes to the off side of the switch, and the Positive side (Red goes to Pos) is on the on side of the switch:
Re-wiring the switch is probably the hardest
Now this next step is probably the hardest thing you will encounter. Plug the six pin male PSU plug into the box, by this stage as stated earlier, you will have fixed the swith, put some electrical tape in any exposed areas to make sure you get a viable current flow (and for safety as well), then position the intercooler over the bottom panel to a position where it can 1. have the wires easily clear the end to the PSU, 2. look at where the little stubbs located on the bottom of the intercooler frame are touching the bottom panel.. the stubbs are a little bigger than the holes on the panel. therfor we need to make a couple of slight modifications.
* First off, get a sharpy, and look at all the stubbs (on the intercooler frame) and holes (on the bottom panel of the box), and figure out which position would be the best for clearence, and also make sure its a position where you need to make the LEAST amount of cutting to get the stubs to fit in. Mark these holes with the sharpy (oil based pen, good for plastic).
* I was lucky enough to get nearly 4 of the 8 stubbs to go into holes (which i needed to enlarge). Again, pull out the handheld plastic butter knife (thats what I call it) and go to work cutting off the stubbs off of the cooler you no longer need, and make holes bigger if necessary for the stubbs which will fit into the template you made earlier with your sharpy.
Heres a pic of the holes I made:
http://img594.imageshack.us/img594/2131/bottompanelwithholesenl.jpg
So once you have that and you have a good fit, your basically home and hosed. I guess if it isnt a great fit, you could use some Blu-Tac to reinforce the fitting, but generally you should be able to get a good fit. Im sure a USB version would be safer to use, but I dont have access to one, so i dont know if its easy enough to just open one up and switch the fans around. Heres some final pics1, the first one shows that the wiring is a little yucky to look at, but when its in its hidy hole, no one can see it, ALSO note that I have cut out the plastic around the fan Outlet at the rear as this plastic was a heat transfer nightmare... could cook an egg on top of the box.. Any suggestions on how to clean it up would be appreciated, and the last pic is of the Xbox running with the fan attached:
http://img830.imageshack.us/img830/7916/faninstallednoteoverkil.jpg
And finally!!!!:
http://img189.imageshack.us/img189/7898/fanattachedandrunningni.jpg
So there you go guys, if any of you have one of these monsters which are NOT any good as an intercooler... I suggest 1. Bite the bullet and upgrade your internal fan to a better quality item, and 2. If you want to lower temps EVEN more do this cold air intake mod.
Mods feel free to sticky this if you think its worth anything, of course with added suggestions if applicable!!
Cheers guys,
Be good.
TPR
Last edited: