Making a Linksys EG008W Gigabit Switch
Quiet
Todd Shoemaker
1/10/2005
The Problem
As soon as I plugged in the EG008W gigabit switch, I was surpised at how loud
the fan was in the unit. It was high-pitched, rattly, and over
time the pitch of the sound would vary and waver. I have very
quiet PCs in my home office, and this hub was many many times louder
than the three machines running in the office. Besides the
loudness, I was concerned with the reliability of the fan in the
switch. From the sound, I guessed it was a small chipset fan, and
it sounded cheap, which meant it would probably fail within a year or
so and could cause the unit to overheat, especially since I would want
to hide the unit to mask the noise.
Time for Modification
I decided to modify the unit to make it quieter, and I documented my
steps in this document.
DISCLAIMER: PERFORM THESE STEPS
AT YOUR OWN RISK. IF YOU TAKE YOUR LINKSYS UNIT APART, YOU WILL VOID YOUR WARRANTY, AND WILL LIKELY BREAK THE UNIT WHILE ELECTROCUTING YOURSELF IN THE
PROCESS. I CANNOT BE HELD RESPONSIBLE OR LIABLE FOR ANY DAMAGES OR INJURIES
THAT RESULT FROM FOLLOWING THESE INSTRUCTIONS. REPEAT, DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME!
Now that the disclaimers are out of the way, if you don't care about
your warranty and aren't afraid to break open electronic components and
use a Dremel and a soldering iron, these steps will hopefully help you
along the way.
The Parts
Here is the original (LOUD) unit:
There are no screws to dissassemble the unit, only seams with a sticker
telling you that opening the unit will void the warranty. It
looked like the bottom would come off first, but I was wrong. The
front "hood" comes off, and it is held in place by two grooves on the
sides. Push in on the gray plastic just behind the blue front
plastic, and pull hard. The front hood will come off. See
the grooves in the figure below. Note how much I tore up
the bottom of the case finding this out. Now that you know how to
do it, you won't have to stick screwdrivers in every seam and hole in
the bottom of the unit to try to tear it open. (You're welcome)
After getting taking the front hood off, the top cover will come right
off. The bottom cover is held in place with a small screw, but
you shouldn't have to take the board off the bottom cover to perform
the modification. Here's what the inside looks like, and notice
the the cheap 40mm fan making all that noise:
My first plan was to go online and buy a quality ball-bearing 40mm fan
and replace the stock fan. After a bit of Googling I found a fan
for about $11 USD with shipping that had something like 20dB of
noise. But, just before I clicked submit, my frugal side jumped
in and remembered that I had a couple of surplus 80mm case fans sitting
in the closet doing nothing. These fans last forever, are really
quiet, and (best of all) were free. I closed my browser, took
everything downstairs to the Dremel, and started to work. Here
are the parts used;
My job was to somehow make this fan work with this unit, and not tear
anything up or set the house on fire. I noticed that the vent holes
in the top of case fit almost exactly in the inner diameter of the 80mm
fan intake, so not only were my cutting lines drawn, I would only have
to cut about 50% of the material!
I first started cutting from the top:
And for each cut, I flipped it over and finished cutting from the
bottom:
After a bit of noise and a couple of Dremel cutting disks later, the
cut was complete, and just needed a bit of smoothing with the sanding
attachment.
Now, I put the Linksys case hood back on to use the plastic ridge as a
guide, and then I put the fan on top to measure and cut the
holes. I didn't have a writing instrument that would reach into
the fan holes, so I just very carefully drilled the holes while I held
the fan in place. Again, using the Linksys hood to hold the fan
in place makes this easy:
After four drilling four holes, the top of the case looks like this:
The final step was to drill a hole for the fan wire to pass into the
case. I used a small spade bit to cut a clean hole for the
three-prong fan connector through the case. You can see the hole
in the image below.
Final Tweaks
Important! When putting the new fan into this unit, make sure you bind up the excess wire and keep it off the components inside. I don't know how hot some of the chips get, but I didn't want to risk melting the wire insulation, so I kept the wire off the components by winding the excess around the old (disconnected) 40mm fan.
At this point, I put the thing together to see how it would work.
It worked fine, but it still wasn't silent, although many times more
quiet than before, and the fan pushed a lot more air than the old
one. I decided that I needed a buffer between the fan and the
case to reduce noise and rattle, and I wanted to slow the fan down with a resistor to make it even
more quiet. So, I dug around for something to cushion the
fan. I had some leftover door/window sealing material, which is
the perfect size for this project, and better yet, it already has
adhesive on back. Best of all, it was already sitting around for
free. You could easily use cardboard, felt, cloth, or just about
anything else. After the padding was in place, the case looked
like this (note the spade bit hole on the right for the fan wire):
To slow down the fan, I cut one of the wires connected to the fan, and soldered a 47-ohm resistor
in-line, and wrapped it with electrical tape after cleaning the excess
wire. I had purchased a 5-pack of these a couple of years ago to
slow down a loud chipset fan on an AMD motherboard. They were
about $1.99 USD for the pack. Luckily I still have three more
left:
Finally, after attaching the fan to the case with some small (0.5 or
0.75 inch) wood or sheet metal screws I found in the "spare screw" box,
the new and improved unit was complete!
Results:
The new unit is almost silent, and even with the fan turning at a
reduced rate with the 47-ohm resistor, there is a lot of airflow going
through the unit. You can actually feel the intake air on the bottom of
the unit with your hand. I would wager that you could stack
this unit on top of another one with its fan disconnected, and this one fan
would probably keep both units cool.
If you have one of these units and can't handle the noise, there is
hope! Enjoy!
-Todd