This post is originally from ARogan (here). I plan on doing a smiliar mod to my BDI 8428 cabinet. I have my receiver, cable box, and Xbox 360 in it now, but with the back on this thing gets really hot. Adding a HTPC is just going to make the heat worse.
BDI Fan Mod by ARogan
- Yes I’m obsessed with cooling. So I wanted to add some low speed 12cm DC fans to get some active cooling in the cabinet. AC fans are expensive and noisy. PC fans should work great but I didn’t want to use a big pc power supply.
- USB to IDE cable with AC adapter. The should work perfectly. All I’m going to use out of this box is the power supply. It provides your standard +12v (and +5v) molex connector and 2A which should be enough to power about 10 fans at .2A each.
The SATA version works fine too or try this.
- Enermax Marathon 120mm Fan. I bought 6 but you should get at least 4. Here is a nice review.
- molex splitters
- molex extensions
- 3 to 2 pin on the ac power plug to remove the ground so you can connect it directly into the ac outlet on the back of the receiver. This way the fans turn on/off with the receiver.
- Each fan comes with a 3pin to 4pin converter and has a built in split so you probably don’t need that many dedicated splitters.
- You might want to get some fan grills. This is mostly for any additional fans you might want to put near the rear of the cabinet.
- Velcro dots to attach the fans to the cabinet
- So the idea is to attach a fan to each of the air slits in the floor of the cabinet. That would be a total of 4 fans forcing air into the cabinets. You can’t see them at all unless you stick your head on the floor.
- I’m a bit worried about dust but since the fans won’t be on 24/7 (only when the receiver is on) hopefully it won’t get too bad.
- I’ve got 6 fans so far: 4 attached to the bottom, 1 blowing across the top of the receiver, another one cooling the sa 3250hd.
- So far this solution is working great. You can’t even hear the fans unless the room is quiet and you are within 3 ft of the fans.
