PS3Hax member Pirate has finished his water-cooled laptop mod of the Sony PlayStation 3. It took him three years to design and build because he did not follow any tutorials (nor will he be providing one).
This is Pirate's second PS3 portable, which he has officially dubbed "Pirate's PS3 Water-cooled Portable/Laptop." The water cooling system replaces the stock heatsinks in his first mod, allowing for a slimmer design that can fit in a smaller case, as you can see in the video below. The case, which is made of an aluminum base plate and sintra/komatex, was constructed from scratch. It was routed via CNC machines with designs created in Adobe Illustrator. Here are the mod's features, according to Pirate:
- Water-cooled with easy accessible reservoir
- HD: 720p/1080i screen (via HDMI)
- Four USB ports
- 500GB HDD
- External PSU
- Built-in keyboard
- Built-in speakers with volume controls and a 2.5mm headphone jack
- The stock PS3 is a 40GB SKU (there was no PS3 slim when the project was started)
- Dimensions are 16.75" x 13" x 2.5" (16.75" x 13" x 3.5" with lid closed)
- Weighs about 15lbs
A small quirk is that the PS3 game disc has to go in backwards. This was the only way to get the drive to fit inside the case without having to manually extend the PS3 Blu-ray ribbon cable.
The mod has been posted on eBay with an asking price of $0.99. Multiple bids have already placed it in the hundreds, unsurprisingly higher than the PS3's retail price.
Pirate is not looking to make a profit - he is promising that after accounting for costs, a portion of the selling price will go to server expenses at PS3Hax, with another portion dedicated to tornado relief efforts in Joplin, Missouri. Because of this, I'm tempted to bid up the price myself, even though I'm not sure what I would do with it if I accidentally ended up being the winning bidder.