The Emerald XBOX 360

Is your XBOX 360 overheating? Do you (or your XBOX 360) suffer from the ring of death condition? Look no further! Go EMERALD!!

This is one the very first XBOX 360's that came out. And after getting very frustrated by the lack of action from Microsoft regarding my freezing console, and with the approach of the release date for Halo 3, I was left with no choice but to use my superior craftsmanship skills(yeah right!) and put them to award winning work as you're about to see!

After researching the internetic tubulations, it seems the overheating problem of the XBOX 360 is caused by a lack of space inside the console that doesn't allow for appropriate venting of the heat generated by the GPU. The ring of death condition happens later caused by the solder taking too much of a beating from extreme temperature variation and becoming brittley.

My console in particular could never stand being on for too long while playing an XBOX 360 title. Gears Of War would make her freeze within an hour from cold, and PGR3 a little after that.

This left me stuck playing titles that didn't seem to lock her up, like Geometry Wars and Halo 2. But even the effort of playing Halo 2 would get to her after 3-4 hours!

The common symptoms would be a window popping up telling you the console was unable to read the disc and that you should attempt cleaning it. Of course once she got to that point all sorts of coocky stuff would happen! Something as simple as playing videos on the dashboard would cause her to freeze, or she'd play them with crazy random coloured boxes and strange artifacts, or she'd not play anything at all and would recommend cleaning the hard drive.

I'm not the only one who has seen these symptoms. (It's not all in my head matey!)

She never did have the ring of death symptom mostly because due to the constant freezing up I've barely used it in the two years before Halo 3.

Enter the EMERALD!

Behold a fine example of craftsmanship and ultra top end technology and stupidity!

The concept was to force new air in, wash it over needy parts, and suck it out. Pretty simple!

The means the 2 fans at CPU side force the air in, and a fan sitting on top of the GPU heat sink rams air straight into it and over the surrounding motherboard components, leaving the air to be sucked out by the two fans past the hard drive. But you didn't need me telling you this because you're a smart puppy and can see the drawing above. (No offense to those who can't.)

Of course there were problems. You now don't have a button to open the DVD unit, or a button to sync your gamepad, or a power button!

But something like the tip of pen will do the trick in operating these buttons. Turning the Emerald XBOX 360 on and opening that DVD tray can easily be achieved using the gamepad.

Preparing the XBOX 360 to be jailed up in this new see-through prison was as simple as removing all the white plastics and 6 screws. Bending and precisely cutting a side of the metal case was done to allow more air under the motherboard and CPU. (Ok, maybe it wasn't that precisely cut as previously mentioned. I call it artistic cutting! You may have another name for it.)

You can also notice I left the plastic ducts for the heat sinks. This means the two fans the XBOX 360 came with will push air onto the heat sinks and also under the motherboard which I think is important. My original idea was to have an additional two fans underneath blowing onto the motherboard itself. But this proved to be too complicated for my advanced manufacturing skills, so was quickly dropped. Plus, the release date for Halo 3 was fast approaching and I needed a working XBOX 360.

The DVD unit is sitting on the Hard Drive itself and is kept in place by two plastic pins sitting past the side wall so it doesn't move. No additional cables were needed which is good and made it simpler.

To build the Emerald XBOX 360, I used...
- 3 sheets of 5mm clear acrylic perspex plexiglass420x297mm
- 5 Themaltake Thunderblade 120mm LED A1928 fans (12v, 2000rpm, 78cfm, 21dbA)
- 1 SkyTronic 110-240Vac 50/60Hz 12Vdc 2.5A power supply
- 4 small shelf 'L' shape brackets
- a lot of sloppy work

Well built? No! There are fan wires everywhere, and the top lid is kept in place using nothing but the force of gravity. And the fans? Well they are kept in place by friction. The DVD unit sits on top of the hard drive, and is mostly kept in place by, yes more gravity, the length of the connecting cables at the back.

The fans are plugged in before every use, and I didn't put a power switch for them due to lack of space inside the box.

But this wasn't meant to stop bullets, or to be used in crash tests. It was meant to keep her cool while playing Halo 3 and other titles, so when the other grown up kids come over no more sobbing faces will be seen when she overheats. No ring of death, no freezing XBOX 360, just playing, fun, abuse, trash talk, and lots of me getting my ass handed over on a platter!

And yes I've noticed that this Emerald XBOX 360 doesn't look in any way like an emerald!

See how long it takes you before this spinning Emerald XBOX 360 makes you dizzy!

So I'm sure a lot of people with better hand skills will do a much better job of this. To be honest I'm curious! Would love to see what others have done to keep their XBOX 360's cool and chilled. (send your links guys and girls!)

But for me, water cooling would have been something I wouldn't trust my hands with. And, as ugly she is, it's nice to be playing while enjoying a soothing green glow, knowing she won't freeze up. And that's what matters!

Now I can ignore my family for hours on end while playing Halo 3 online while enjoying the green glow from this Emerald XBOX 360. (Do you want one? Send me $2000 and I'll build you one! Or you can make it yourself for less money!)

My gamertag is Ch3wthis, meet me on XBOX Live! ;)