Today I looked at Xbox #2, which made some strange fan-based noises. I checked the fan, and in fact, the CPU fan (which made the noises) had a much larger axial tolerance than the GPU fan. With some minimal force I could even detach the fan blades! It seemed that the clamped connection wasn’t in place, and touched a non-moving part. I simply removed the clamp, so the fan is now only hold in place via magnetism.
I’m not good at case-modding, and I cannot judge at all whether a cooling system is a good one or not. So I have to totally trust in the engineering power which Microsoft has invested into the Xbox 360 cooling system.
Still, my Xbox #9 had a problem, even I could see that.
I’ve removed the GPU heatsink, and removed the (evil? Probably not really.) thermal foil (I couldn’t see any damage/misalignment on it, though.
I was sick of attaching my VGA cable to each box while booting, so I fixed that:
The nice thing is that the VGA AV-Pack can still be attached. So when I need to debug a box, i can just attach it, and the videomode etc. (which we cannot set in linux at the moment) is already set to VGA.
Unit #2 has still a problem with the DVDROM.
Though i fear that unit #9 has a thermal problem:
$ ./foreach /usr/src/smc -s | grep sensor sensor data: 65.3 C, 61.4 C, 66.9 C, 29.9 C, sensor data: 69.1 C, 63.7 C, 64.2 C, 29.9 C, sensor data: 70.0 C, 59.3 C, 61.1 C, 28.8 C, sensor data: 66.9 C, 62.3 C, 62.5 C, 30.2 C, sensor data: 69.4 C, 63.
After about two and a half hours of opening, flashing, closing all the boxes, they were all ready. Side note: All boxes were produced on 2006-10-25, and all had Hitachi drives. Did you know that drives are stackable?
Don’t they look nice? (Don’t worry about the red ring - they just don’t have any AV cable connected yet.)
Today at 9:50AM, the local GLS dude brought three big packages. Inside: A total of 5.12GB of RAM, 30 PPC64 CPU cores, 10 ATI (approx.) R600-level GPUs, seperated evenly into… 10 Xbox 360! The mission: Using them with Linux, having some fun! (Ok, the real mission was to evaluate if we can replace some normal servers with 360 hardware.)