fox

Yes, last year my main xbox's psu started overheating followed by the same symptoms. The fault was not with my mainboard, I verified this by swapping in a known working psu. So if you have another psu, find out. And technically it's not a "FRAG" by the way.

maybe the psu is overheating

WHo cares. I only wonder what new xbox smell is like. I wanna stuff my snout in that thing and inhale.

I know ebayers have gotten real greedy but...

that's only like a year's worth of rent money in a certain country

Yep. Don't apply force to frozen plastic (generally speaking), especially when it's hard to begin with. I've shattered two plexiglass windows in winter trying to smack them open on the corners. I think the temperature was a mere 20F.

Okay. I thought showing some poorman methods could help. Someone out there might decide two hours of work is preferable to spending the cash on a heat gun, a drill and hole cutter.

it's a 1/10 job on the difficulty scale

*grabs a drink from my crowded freezer* Back to work. I peel off whatever's left of the adhesive pad thing. Maybe I could've just rubbed it off. Meh. For the absolutely clueless amongst us, what I'll be doing here is cutting a hole in order to add LEDs underneath to light the jewel (after polishing out the jewel). Mind you this whole area is not getting hollowed out, the jewel needs a rim of plastic to sit on. I decide the rim will be 4mm wide. Not owning a tool able to directly measure the plastic, I use my ruler to measure 4mm of width on some thick-ish paper and cut out a strip of that to use as my tool instead. With the paper strip and a needle I go around the circumference of the plastic, measuring and poking it with the needle to mark off 4 millimeters. With the needle's tip I connect the dots. Now the rim is clearly defined. Now I get my leather work gloves and safety glasses on. With my utility knife I score a second, smaller circle into the plastic. It looks like this (when it's done). Oh. The second circle doesn't need to be so close, but setting it farther away just means even more plastic to cut off later, and more time out of my day to cut it. At the start of scoring the plastic I'm applying very light pressure with the knife and keeping it slanted backward a bit so (1) the knife doesn't jump off track and cut things it's not supposed to, and so (2) if it possibly does jump, it jumps into the middle area there that we don't care about. Pic below shows the slant. Next pic shows how I'm really using my knife. I am not actually pulling it around with my right hand. My right hand is only holding it while my left thumb nudges against the blade to move it along. This gives me the most control over my cutting. Round and round we go, scoring the circle deeper. My aim is not to cut completely through the case, only to dig a groove. It's needed for the next step. This work takes a long g'damn time tbh. Better turn some music on... That's deep enough. Now I'm going to really cut out the plastic. I stab the groove and press down while wrenching my blade back and forth in the manner indicated by the blue arrows until its tip has penetrated the underside of the xbox's cover. I pull the knife out and continue along the circumference. Some explaining is in order. My reasons for the making the smaller circle and scoring it in before this step are (1) cutting right into the rim that I marked off would obviously ruin everything, and because (2) the plastic in that area of the xbox's cover is 3mm thick, too thick to stab and wrench at, it would take too much force to be safe for me or the xbox. The groove made it safe. All done. Now I reach in from underneath and trim the whole gnarly surface, cutting with a motion indicated by the arrow, gently, with little pressure. This step is not about final shaping so I stop just before reaching the 4mm rim. There's a tiny bit of slack left. ... I should say, even after all this cutting, the tip of the blade was still sharp enough to shave fur. :3 Greatest hobby knife ever, haha. Next step is final shaping. I do this with very coarse sandpaper and I do it outdoors while wearing a respirator (not a useless covid mask) and while running a fan. Sanding this plastic turns it into superfine dust that gets absolutely everywhere into the air, instantly, and I don't wanna discover what diseases I'd get from breathing that crap. If I didn't own a respirator and fan I'd just totally wrap my face in a shirt and jump into the shower afterward with the cover and all my clothes on. You know what. Maybe next time I'll just do the work while showering. Any grit of sandpaper from 40 to 80 will work. No fixed motions or angles are required for the sanding. Just shape the rim. Reaching in from underneath so I don't accidentally hit the exterior. I'm going to finish the shaping later and polish the edge with higher grit sandpapers. This is the look of things now. More to come.

This thread will demonstrate how the xbox jewel can be removed, and in a pair of follow-up posts how a hole for it can be made on the xbox cover, all in a very low-tech manner. I'm not confident enough to call these tutorials, but they may be helpful. First: removing the jewel. I grab a couple feet of dental floss and stuff it under the edge of the jewel with a card or what have you. Then I dribble some rubbing alcohol down there, because in my experience rubbing alcohol acts as a mild solvent on the adhesive pad thingy underneath. Whatever helps. By the way it was another modder, not me, who invented the floss method. I start flossing while keeping the arms of the floss in that letter U shape. I'm going to add more alcohol in a minute and re-position the floss at the other side of the jewel then continue working it. After a while the floss approaches the middle of the jewel and it starts to bind, that's when I add some mineral oil to lubricate everything. Pretty much any type of oil will do though. The whole mess starts to look like this... Getting farther in, the floss wants to bind again despite the oil. I don't want it to snap. I lift one of its arms to a 90 degree angle and slowly work the floss back into action. Eventually the jewel is off. This took maybe 10 minutes.

I recently bought another of this PSU and found that, for some reason, R14 is a different value on each of my two units. It's 1 ohm on my current PSU, and 3.3 on the new one (going by the color bands). This is odd. I assumed xbox PSUs to be identical according to model+revision and have never read anywhere that two of the same PSU may actually vary in component values here or there. It makes me wonder how and if the rest of the circuit is different. Is it even safe to transplant mosfets, diodes etc from this new PSU if my current one goes on the fritz. Oh, and R6 is a cooked mess on the new unit, too. Lol. Ended up with only more questions and no answers.

I have 2.6ce that did the same thing, then it just croaked.

you can do them one at a time

I think the consensus is that up to the mid-60s celsius is safe. Although I personally don't feel fine with anything, xbox or not, exceeding the 50s, and prefer temps in the 30s-40s. Given the great age of these xboxes now I am of the opinion that keeping heat as low as possible is important, but others may disagree. So "should be" is a little relative.

good stuff

I think they automatically shut off like any PC if either processor reaches critical temperature (80c iirc), so your box is probably not in danger of a meltdown if you've ran it and auto-shutoff hasn't happened. But if you're worried just buy a high quality paste from a reputable seller and change the stuff, it's not gonna make your box run worse, and who gives a crap what other people say? Let the thing run for a good while though to get the factory paste warm so you don't risk tearing a processor off the board.

r u rich?

I thought we had this discussion. Making the hole is a 1/10 job on the difficulty scale, you don't even need a power tool.

that's frankly a little too long

is this the same halo box you have on ebay?

pfft, no between the sink and its plastic enclosure It makes no sense that MS didn't design it to fit in there tight. I planned to make a solid copper sink years ago to fit flush with the plastic..besides other reasons, but I never found enough scrap copper. Melting metals is too risky anyway without a proper setup and training, if one raindrop or a bug lands onto the melt it's blammo, you're gonna look like sandra bernhard at the end of hudson hawk. There has to be better solution to the heatsink sliding than shimming it with crap from my floor.

no joke I shimmed my heatsink with an empty pack of rolling papers folded over, I hate the sliding too

in my experience 99% alcohol is not actually more effective than 91% as a solvent, on anything, removing gpu paste takes just as much as 91%

I had a 2.6ce and xapt3r which did those things all the time ( a year long ), too. I assume you've re-seated the xapt3r at times and noticed the problems go away for a awhile? All this is because the xapt3r provides a crappy connection. It's so bad I seriously doubt that the clock capacitor, even if it has leaked as mentioned, is contributing to the symptoms. I suggest learning to solder and installing the pins for the xecuter if you can find or possibly make some. Using the pins fixed those boot problems for me 100%.

better front panel lights, the old yellow-green & dull red are just blah