Looks great! I hope undervolting will keep it chilly...
I hope so too!
My old thermal paste was dried up... the new stuff just arrived.
I sanded off some of the alumina to hopefully help with heat conduction. I didn't go overboard because I need to keep the rest of the shell non-conductive. Many solder joints are in contact with the insulative alumina, so any inadvertently exposed aluminum would be catastrophic.
This motherboard really doesn't like being undervolted. In fact, its tolerance has
decreased over the course of my testing. Not sure why that is. In the end, I had to go with a very mild undervolt to maintain stability.
Stress testing glamour shot:
With these settings, Thundervolt reported a board temp of
75°C after ~40 minutes of 4-player Melee. The case is well above the touch temperature comfort limit for metal (43°C)-- probably close to the touch temp safety limit of 60°C.
It crashed after an hour or so. Wesk says this is typical of higher temps.
Not good enough!
Keeping the board temp at 60C or below is the goal for stability reasons. I would like to get the outer shell temp to 50C or below, so it can be touched safely during operation.
Just to recap for those not in the Discord, here the options available for reducing heat in the Kawaii:
✓ = definitely implementing
〇 = possible and may implement
✗ = not yet possible
- ✓ Using a Hollywood-2 Wii Mini OMEGA
- Hollywood-2 motherboards are ~12% more efficient than Hollywood-1s on average
- I have some Pico Ws in the mail so I can Bluebomb a few Minis and get started on this
- ✓ Supplying Thundervolt with a lower voltage
- The regulators on Thundervolt will be marginally more efficient when powered from 3.3V instead of 5V
- This is a very easy change, just requiring an added buck in the dock, but won't help that much (delta of 10s of mW)
- 〇 Adding a fan to the dock
- @Wesk successfully added a 20x20x6mm blower fan to the dock MCAD, without growing its dimensions
- This should probably be saved as a last resort to decrease temps if the other options can't get things below ~60C
- But I'm going to add support for the fan in the next dock PCB revision regardless, so we have the option if needed
- ✗ Using GameCube clockspeeds
- Nintendont runs the Wii at normal Wii clockspeeds (729MHz CPU vs GameCube's 486MHz)
- @Aurelio experimented with decreasing the clockspeeds, which can save 500-800mW over stock clocks, but there are still major issues to work out
- Wesk and I have an experimental Nintendont build with GC clocks, but controllers don't work in it
- It's unknown whether Wii games would still behave at decreased clocks
