I finally got round to taking the Bravo to pieces and changing the modchip for something better than the 'Aladdin Advance' which was fitted. I was quite shocked with a couple of the things I saw inside, the biggest of which was the liberal use of what appeared to be Arctic Silver thermal compound on the CPU. Anyone who knows anything about installing a CPU will know that using too much of this is a bad thing, instead of the heat being transferred to the heatsink, it spreads throughout the compound and keeps the heat within the airgap between the heatsink and the CPU packaging. Another disappointment was the poor heat transfer pads on the MCPX and GPU chips, they just looked like doublesided tape - hardly sufficient for a system under heavy load, I replaced these with Arctic Silver thermal epoxy.

There were problems with the power supply unit, it had a switch to enable it to work in the UK, but it didnt seem to work. Luckily I planned ahead and bought a replacement PSU from eBay. The modchip was installed very professionally along with the extra RAM chips and CPU.

I've just installed Gentoox Media Center Edition on it, and it really runs a treat. No, I'm not just saying this to get more sales for Friendtech, it actually runs noticeably faster than a standard Xbox (which is what I developed it on!). The CPU runs a lot cooler now that I have it properly cooled, it was running at 67C, I'm currently ripping a DVD and its peaked at 48C (took 20m50s to rip Diehard 3).

Click "Read More" for some photos I took.

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Preinstalled Aladdin Advance (Notice the MCPX heatsink).

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After removing the poor sticky heatpad, I coated it in a good quality epoxy.

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Heatsinks (Notice the custom metal clamp on the GPU).

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CPU swimming in thermal compound along with the horrible heat pad on the GPU.

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CPU heatsink caked in thermal compound.

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Properly applied thermal epoxy on the GPU along with the CPU cleaned out.

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Properly applied thermal compound on the CPU.

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I almost feel bad removing the well installed modchip, but a good replacement was needed!