I never had an Xbox 360 when it was new, but I remember seeing the Lian Li PC-XB01 case in a PC magazine. I loved the idea of a console in a Lian Li case (this was back when Lian Li cases were known for two things: being fully constructed from aluminium and having obsessive build quality).

Fast forward a few years, and I happened to spot one on Ebay. I still didn’t have an Xbox 360 (or any Xbox), but that doesn’t matter. I needed a project to keep me busy, and this was perfect. It even came with a waterblock for the old “phat” 360, because that was one of the ways people tried to solve the infamous Red Ring of Death problem.

As was pretty common at the time the PC-XB01 included a couple of grommets to pass tubing through to external radiators, but I set myself the challenge of fitting everything inside the chassis because that’s much more fun.

Throughout the lifecycle of the initial “phat” 360 it received several revisions, which among other things reduced its power draw. Crucially, the connector on the power supply was keyed to be backwards compatible, so you could run a Jasper revision console (the last revision of the “phat” 360, which shipped with a 150w power brick) on the 175w PSU that came with earlier revisions, so that’s exactly what I did to give me an extra 25w of headroom to run the loop. Ironically the Xbox itself was one of the cheapest parts I picked up for this project at around 20 quid.

I opened up the power brick and identified where on the PCB I could connect extra wires to 12v (for the pump, UV LED strip and fan), 5v (for the Aqua Computer Poweradjust single-channel controller) and drilled a hole in the casing to accept a sleeved and strain booted cable.

At the other end I drilled a hole into the rear of the chassis and used a 4 pin mini XLR connector to pass the power through the rear panel to the loop components.

The PC-XB01 didn’t come with a case window out of the box and I wanted to see the fruit of my labours, so I drew one up in Fusion360 in the shape of the Xbox logo, which at the time the Xbox 360 was current looked like this:

I took the side panel and .step file down the road to Dragon Laser, and had an acrylic panel milled to sit flush by ColdZero, and the final parts of the project fell into place.