Xbox Spa-day.

[tp4tissue]

Alot of young noobrs throw out the original fan and HDD.

Bah-humbug says Tp4, an older m0ar-speranced xbrrer.

Your xbrrx is LESS ORIGINAL, if you throw out the OG Fan.

These are ball bearing fans, the reasons they get grindy is cuz the dust buildup eventually gunks up the races.

EASY-fix, infinite life virtually, in an xbox, very low lifetime RPM.


Pop them out of the chamber with a dental pick. Don't pry too hard or one can damage the housing. They're just friction fit in there.



Put into small contact lens cupper, pour in alcohol, Commence the shakes.  Rinse and repeat a few times.



Supr Clean clean clean.. BEHOLD, Perfection!!   

Add grease,  reassemble.



Tp4 previously used Gelid Extreme on CPU, BAD IDEA. Horrific pump out situation, this would kill your CPU after a while.

You can see the edges have absolutely no paste. Completely dry. These are pentium 3 arch, they can take a beating, but alot of xboxes die nowadays because people use generic thin pastes.

Switching to PTM7950.  This is the ideal paste for the Bare Dies, because the block is too smooth, pump out inevitable.





Do not use PTM for the GPU, The GPU isn't hot enough to get the ptm thin, it would take a very very long time,  use regular paste for GPU. 

GPU is a more classic design with a carbon sleeve around the center IHS, not bare die. Paste will be fine here. The sleeve is designed to keep more paste towards the center and slow pump out.  This design is fine for low overall wattage chips.

[tp4tissue]

Hrrrrm.. It seems that pentium 3 rated Tjunction is around 80C, recommended 70C operational.

Currently Xbox reports 55C CPU.  If Tp4 cranks the fan to max, it runs 46C.  55C should be more than adequate, since this era of cpu didn't throttle down, this is as high as it goes.

Would consider further mods if for whatever reason, Pro-Halo-1 became a thing again.

Maybe cut out the metal grill part in the back. Buh.... kind of a hassle for not much gain.


Tp4 could switch to an SSD, buhh, you kinda don't get that feeeels unless you hear that mechanical go Brrrrr..  Then again, that's 5 watt of heat right there.  Quite alot of load shed.

[tp4tissue]

Seems like there's a custom bios which upregulates to udma5 from udma2, which greatly increases bandwidth from HDD.

Hrrrrmm.. $20 adapter + $90 SSD + $15 tti programmer.  Hrrrm...

[tp4tissue]

Hnnnggn.. Tp4 feels the compulsion to do it, but it's pretty much useless, since Tp4 doesn't play any games with the load times.

[noisyturtle]

you will get 0% performance gain, and potentially cause more issues since the OG Xbox because it existed before ssd's were a thing. The way it writes and reads data it makes many segmented partitions to access specific data points repeatedly. Regular hdd is superior for this type of operation.

[tp4tissue]

The new ssd controllers does garbage collect, it won't do trim, but ultimately that just leads to more write amplification, which we don't care about because the Xbox will never write enough to kill it.