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Any horror stories from not properly ventilating a MAME cabinet

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Mrephunk:
With my cab build right now I am designing it to use a 360, my plan is to remove it completely form its housing and mount the MB on PCB feet, moving the dvd drive and hopefully alleviating heat problems

bkenobi:

--- Quote from: saint on June 28, 2011, 12:45:12 pm ---Houses used to be cooled this way back (albeit with actual design intended) before air conditioning, right?

--- End quote ---
They still are.  Attics are designed to remain vented to help with moisture issues.  There are soffit vents at the low points on the roof that need to remain open to keep fresh air entering.  There are different ways to vent the high point of the roof, but jack vents are one of the more common.  You won't likely feel any air movement if you enter the attic (unless a strong wind kicks up), but you can be assured that this ventilation is effective and REQUIRED!  I just bought a house last year that the vents had been all but covered in one section of the house.  That section had massive damage to the sheeting and rot/mold issues in some locations.  The roof had been redone ~2 years prior, so this ventilation truly makes a HUGE difference.

As far as cabinets, again, this is an effective way to remove heat.  BUT, if you have thermally sensitive electronics, you need to have a lower ambient temperature or much higher flow rates to sufficiently cool the components.

bkenobi:

--- Quote from: Mrephunk on June 28, 2011, 12:50:38 pm ---With my cab build right now I am designing it to use a 360, my plan is to remove it completely form its housing and mount the MB on PCB feet, moving the dvd drive and hopefully alleviating heat problems

--- End quote ---

That may be a BAD idea!  The case of the Xbox is designed with air flow/cooling in mind.  If you decase the system and don't add sufficient cooling to the components, you could end up with a dead system.  If you put a fan facing the board with a high enough flow rate, you should be fine though.

Donkbaca:
Nah, the 360 shuts down when it gets hot.  The overheating errors you get are from a design flaw in early 360's due to a combination of poor solder/ poor heat transfer compound on the heat sinks, and odd pressure points on the mobo. It has more to do with a design flaw than actual heat.  The 360 has a temp sensor and is designed to shut down before damage is done.  The red rings thing is caused by the repeated heating and cooling of the board over time and poor heat transfer, causing the solder joints on the chips to get messed up.  It doesn't happen from a one time overheat.If the 360 shuts down due to heat, I'll put a fan in.

Anyhow as I said, you can get a MS refurbed one with a controller, 20gb hard drive and all for 99 bucks.  I can sell the controller, HD, and power brick for around 60 bucks or so, so If it takes a dump I am out like 40 bucks or so.  Not worried about it.  And its not like this thing is going to be on for hours at a time, days on end.  It will probably see 4 hours of play a week, on average, in an air conditioned office...

Donkbaca:
Decasing it is fine.  Just make sure the rear fan and the fan manifold are still connected so that it draws air from the gpu and cpu heat sinks.  No need to have a fan blow on them, in fact if you are forcing warm air on them this could be a bad thing. People screw up fans all the time, I have seen so many "this is my intake fan and this is my exhaust fan" mods.  Its dumb, the system does not breathe like we do, it does not use the air, the whole point of fans is get rid of heat, you want fans blowing heat away from the system.  Decasing it will allow more heat to escape, since it won't be stuck in the case, just make sure there is a fan/fans blowing air AWAY from the heatsinks and you will be golden.

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