Nyko Intercooler 360
Mine is a tale of Xbox 360 woe, not unlike that of thousands of other early adopters of the sleek white box. 360 Number 1, which I purchased just before Christmas, was killed by Fight Night, or rather, the common overheating problem that the CPU-intensive game probably precipitated.
360 Number 2, its replacement, had a bad DVD drive and followed its predecessor to McAllen, Texas, the place where 360s go to either die or get “repaired.” Before shipping off Number 2, we went to Best Buy and bought a brand-new core console because we wanted something more recently off the assembly line and, we hoped, more reliable.
When the replacement for Number 2 arrived, it had a crack in the case and is on its way back to McAllen as I type this. In short, my experience with defective 360s has been a huge pain.
I’m telling you all this because I’m not normally the type to buy gadgets for my gaming consoles. On the old Xbox, I never bought a third-party controller or skin, and my current 360 gadget collection consisted of, until recently, only a Play and Charge kit. But you’d better believe that when I heard about the Nyko Intercooler 360, an external fan assembly which purports to lower the 360’s internal operating temperature, I had to have one.
I’m not alone. It says something about the panic that has gripped the 360-owning public that Nyko’s $20 Intercooler 360 is hard to find and sells out of stores as quickly as it arrives. I obtained a brand-new one through dumb luck on Ebay, and it arrived last week.
The Intercooler, whose casing matches the eggshell color and texture of the 360 almost perfectly, is stupidly easy to install and won’t void your warranty. It has clips that attach to the vent holes on the back of the console, and its pass-through power connector simply plugs into the 360’s existing female power jack. The power cord then plugs into the Intercooler’s jack. The Intercooler has its own power switch and will run and shut down when the 360 does. You can switch it off to run the 360 without the Intercooler, although I’m not sure why you’d want to.
The Intercooler has its own noise, but you really can only hear it if you’re playing an Arcade game or playing around in the dashboard. Otherwise it’s easily drowned out by the 360’s own fans and DVD drive. In fact, with the 360’s DVD drive spinning, I had a hard time telling whether the Intercooler was even running without putting my hand behind it.
There’s no doubt that the Intercooler helps to expel hot air from the 360’s innards. My own unscientific test, which involved placing my hand behind the 360 with and without the Intercooler and comparing the temperature and velocity of the air coming out, confirms that. The console itself is cooler to the touch. I also noticed that my game disks come out of the console still warm but noticeably cooler with the Intercooler running, a welcome change from the times when, after hours of intense gaming, a game disk would actually be almost too hot to handle.
Nyko’s own advertising claims that the Intercooler reduces operating temperatures of different regions of the 360 by as much as 10 degrees, and there’s no reason to doubt that it’s true.
But is the Nyko Intercooler the silver bullet that will forestall heat-related failure of the 360? There’s probably no way to know, because not every 360 will experience failure even without the Intercooler. So what, exactly, are you buying for $20? Peace of mind. At this point, anxious 360 owners would buy a Zuni fetish doll if someone claimed it could lower operating temps.
Until then, Nyko will continue to earn money hand over fist addressing the 360’s clearly inadequate on-board ventilation and should enjoy the ride until Microsoft takes steps to remedy this design flaw itself.
| 5/22/2006 Tracey 'Jerri Blank' McCartney |
