 Now there was a big response on social media to the fan upgrade I've worked on on the NEC XM29 CRT. Today we're going to go through and I'm going to do a special just short video on the fan modification only because it's such a big deal that it really deserves its own kind of quick little demonstration. I'm going to show you how to get it to work on this monitor and just so you also know this may work on other similar era monitors that have the same kind of alarm system and that are similar in type to the ones that we're taking actually out of this NEC. Now first off why would we even want to do this modification? Well this CRT has three built-in fans into it and every single one of them has to be running for the monitor to be able to turn on and go through and actually display an image for longer than a couple seconds because if one of the fans does not register it will go into safe mode and the monitor will automatically turn itself off. The specifications on these fans are they are 2000 rpms 12 volt DC you've got a 92 millimeter fan down here at the backside of the CRT next to the input board and then you've got two also 2000 rpm fans that are 80 millimeter one that was up here above our neck board and right next to our geometry deflection board and then we've got another one attached over here to our power supply. We're going to look specifically at the fan that is located up here mounted. It comes down and now Noctua will have an option for a three pin or four pin and your fan producer probably will have the same options available. I got a three pin fan and this is the box for that fan the NF-A8FLX and if we look at the specifications that are listed right here on the back and read what Noctua says about the specifications on this fan it is a 2000 rpm fan with no adapter and we'll talk a little bit more in a second about this adapter which I have got installed right here it's just a noise canceling adapter you do not have to use this and I'll talk a little bit at the end of the video and why you would maybe want to use it or maybe not. What we've got here is a different style connector than the one that's on the board and to make this easier what I've done is I've snipped the end all three wires here on the old fan after I've removed it and then I've spliced in our when you buy a Noctua fan it comes with an extension cable so I've spliced in an extension cable and on the extension end that connects to the fan I've removed the yellow cable that has been severed here and then I've spliced in my red and my ground so my current 12 volt and my ground is spliced into this cable that came from the main board on the monitor I'll show you that header what it looks like on the board and you may say well Steve why didn't if this matches the exact same specification as the fan or replacing shouldn't the alarm have just worked when you connect it and you don't you know you you don't sever that alarm on this connection end and the answer is no it will not work if you just run all three of these wires in here even though the fan meets a specification for some reason it will still go and turn itself off and the way to get around that is very simple you just need to attach and when you sever your lines coming from the main board that used to be attached to the old fan and you're making your adapter to your new fan just attach the yellow alarm line to the ground and that's again the alarm line from the CRT's main board attach it to the ground line which you're connecting to the fan and then you leave the five volt just on its own I've got them nice and covered up here in some platter shrink tubing which you should use to make sure that you don't have any chance of anything shorting out and then I'll use little twists like this to keep them together and then I'll go in and manage my wires in the back normally and then you just plug that directly into the new noctua fan let's power it on and we'll show you what it sounds like with all three of these fans running so hopefully you can see our fans running all in sequence here in the frame of your picture but I wanted to go over a couple of details here as we finish up obviously I'm using high quality noctua fans and I will link to noctua's website and then you can use their part selector it's a very user friendly website and it will tell you which fan you should look for as a replacement to your fans if you have different fans you're working on because as I stated at the beginning of this video you could possibly do this modification on other CRT's and things from this time period if they have alarms built in and it might work this same way this does work on some of the Sony broadcast equipment that have fans in them and I'll show those in other videos in the future but for today that's the fans we use the ones I use have a retail value or retail cost of just under twenty dollars each us shipped and after my taxes I have to pay on them so again we got the two NF a eights that I used in this one and the good thing about these is they do have a lot of advanced anti-vibration technology and again like I said you do get a noise reducing option but what that will do is which we've got here this is the noise reducing filter there's two of them or adapter there's two of them included with each one of these quality or higher premium fans and noctua cells and what that does is it extremely lowers the sound decibels but it also in turn will reduce the rotational speed on the fans so there's two filters there's an ultra low filter and then it's a regular low filter so for example on these 2000 rpm fans adding those filters in line will drop your speeds down and it does have a table on here so you need to check on the back here and see how much you specifically want to alter the speed on your fans and sacrifice that performance with noise it's a trade-off you get a less noise because the fans running a little bit slower or you if you don't care that it's a little bit louder you can remove the adapter and run it straight and get the extended performance personally I feel like the 2000 rpm to begin with was a little bit over engineered to be you know at the original design level personally I feel like if you're running this and you have an open area where you're keeping your crt it's already and you've already had it cleaned and serviced you should have no problem running this at the adapter like this again if you have a nice area for this crt to breathe and have air flow through it and then keep that area clean and if it's not running all the time you should have no problem with this these fans running it with this adapter but that's a choice if you have an area we are going to have a lot of heat you don't have you know the temperature lower it's actually warmer and you have a lot of equipment around it then you definitely would want to consider not using that adapter and using the full power of the fans the one thing I will notice or let you know is that I could not find a noctua fan that was 2000 rpm that was the same size as this 92 millimeter so I did have to install this a9 flex and this one does have a lower starting point at 1600 rpm so you're automatically starting with a 2000 to 2000 to 1600 now just in case you have some questions here about the testing that I did before this when I just installed the wire straight without altering the alarm to ground it I tried that initially with just one fan and I left the other two fans still intact I left these two fans original and then I just had the 1a8 fan which was 2000 rpm and I directly wired it without an adapter so it was right at 2000 rpm rating and it would still trigger the alarm even though it was rated for the proper thing and it was wired correctly so no matter what I did I'd still get that alarm and it would shut the monitor off and then immediately when I did this it went into fine startup mode and it worked perfectly and it would never shut down or send any alarms after just leaving it running and the fans work great let's finish up here talking just a little bit about thermal design and again I don't particularly like the way that NEC when they developed this monitor have the air flow set up so I'm not doing this with the customers CRT I am leaving this with the way the factory and the engineers designed it as far as the fan positioning on which way you would want air flow to go but if if I was personally thinking on what I would do on my idea is I would actually turn this see this is an exhaust mode and that's the way it's always been set where it's blowing out air if this was a design I was working on I would maybe consider making this the intake and I'll tell you why so that way you would suck in cool air down here at the bottom of the back of the CRT and then this fan's pushing and blowing out and this fan over here is also pushing and blowing out away from the circuit board the power supply so instead of having all these blow out and this blow out and causing causing almost it seems like it would cause a negative pressure zone possibly around the CRT tube I think you would want to pull cool air in and then pull it over the boards and then pull it out and then it would exhaust out the top of the back of the CRT through these fans through the vent holes and the coverings and there's also coverings at the bottom so you would have a wind tunnel where it would actually suck in cool air and it would cool the boards and it would exhaust out the top and away from the boards through the top two fans I just think that would have been the ideal design here but that's just my personal opinion and that's not the way any C decided to do it so I don't without like a FLIR camera and actually proving that theory I wouldn't really feel comfortable hopefully one day we can do that kind of a study but that's it that's it for this modification let me know what you have any questions if you have any other monitors or broadcast equipment things like that that you've tried this modification for and it's worked let me know in the comments and that would be pretty cool to have a list going of things that we can get Noctua fans or other brand fans you don't have to use Noctua but they do have a good quality product that works thanks again guys I'll see you next time with some more retro content