Comment by networked | Hacker News Reader

Comment by networked | Hacker News Reader

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I'm surprised to see a fan inside the console. This is the only NVIDIA Tegra 3 device running Android I know of to use active cooling. Why did they choose to have it, is Ouya's CPU/GPU running at a higher clock rate than similar devices'?

A tiny fan like that reminds of the one inside my PS2 Slim, which is loud enough that when I have the inclination to game on it again I'll seriously consider doing a hardware mod to replace it (with a non-stock fan -- just to be safe). I have to wonder by how much this defect (which is apparently not very common with the model) has made me play my PS2 Slim less over the time I have owned it. If the Ouya itself is not sold at a profit this may be a problem. I'm not a hardware professional, so correct me if I'm wrong, but I'd be wary of including a small fan in a consumer product if it were at all possible to avoid it.

Maybe they are trying to avoid the fate of the first generation xbox360?

There is no official info on the technical cause (some people say wrong type of solder that would get too hot and develop hairline cracks, some say the graphics chip dissipated more heat than expected, etc) but it was definitely related to heat.

People often put these devices inside mildly enclosed spaces (media cabinets, etc) with poor natural airflow, etc.

This tends to work okay if you have active cooling (since it's not totally enclosed), but gets amazingly hot otherwise.

This is not normally how tablets are used, and maybe after testing it (or thinking about it) they realized the safest bet was active cooling?

I'm using an i.MX6 development system that uses a similar processor (Quad CortexA9 w/GPU) and has a aluminum cap/heatsink on it:

http://imgur.com/1bJEqLU

The thermal cutout in the Anatop driver defaults to 100C, which seems to be driven by the ratings of the on-board voltage regulators. Perhaps the Tegra has the same requirements.

For what it's worth, I haven't been able to get the fan to spin up at all, even when running a GPU benchmark for 10 minutes or so. It might just be there for some worst case scenario when something could reach dangerous temperatures.

Yes, they overclocked it.

http://www.engadget.com/2013/02/13/ouya-nvidia-lovefest/

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