Did a Noctua fan mod on metal-fan Dreamcast - now not sure

[JP_]

Hi guys,

I recently bought a heavily modded GDemu Dreamcast online and was very pleased with it, apart from the fact it had a stock fan in it that was quite noisy. I have done the Noctua fan mod before on my other Dreamcast (in which I still have the disc drive), so I bought another set of parts and opened my new GDemu Dreamcast up. I found it was the kind with the metal fan in, which I hadn't ever seen before and indeed didn't at this point know existed.

Now, with hindsight I should have come on here at this point and looked at the previous advice on this, where it was recommended not to do a silent fan mod on this model of Dreamcast. But I didn't look for advice - I just blundered ahead, took the whole thing apart and removed the metal fan. At this point I discovered the Noctua fan didn't fit, but I gave it a little bit of surgery by sawing off the corner, and I got it to fit in place. Then I put everything back together.

I had a bit of a fright when I had trouble getting the machine to run again - it kept crashing during boot-up - but I opened it up again, took it all apart again, then reassembled everything, and now it seems to be running OK. I think maybe I didn't have the GDemu hooked up quite correctly.

Anyway, at this point I finally looked online to see what this metal fan was all about, and I came across this thread from a few years ago in which it was recommended not to do a fan mod on this model of Dreamcast because the metal fan is connected to a heatsink and stops it from overheating. Oops. I had wondered why the guy I bought this from had done so many mods on this machine but hadn't done a fan mod. I had thought maybe it might be because it was such a headache to take the machine apart to get the metal fan out, but now I realised there was probably more to it.

Now, among the mods this other guy did is a modification to the power supply unit that he said makes it generate less heat, and I have got the Noctua fan fitted and working in the Dreamcast. So my question is this: given I have already done all the work, do you think I'm going to be OK to keep it like this, or am I going to have to open it all up again and change back to the stock metal fan? Did I waste my whole evening and my money on the fan kit, or should this be OK?

[JP_]

It has been a few days and everything seems to be OK. I’ve not been noticing any problems with heat or with function, so I think I’ll leave it as it is now.