The cooling unit was a custom project that was built over the course of a weekend. The metal housing around the fans was created from, of all things, the steel case of a dead TiVo unit. I measured the three fans, marked the dimensions on the unpainted side of the metal, then cut out the shape with a Dremel. With the piece cut, I bent it to the proper shape using a vise (with the “teeth” covered in cardboard to minimize tool marks). To finish it off, I sanded and painted the metal to match the Xbox, and secured it with some small machine screws and nuts.

The fans I used were from a hard drive cooler purchased from newegg.com, although I can’t seem to find a three-fan unit anywhere on the net anymore. Sites appear to have migrated to selling coolers with two fans. In both cases, though, the fans have an inline Molex power connector, which just splits power from the hard drive to run the fans. It’s a pretty strightforward install as far as the electronics goes.