Review: Wii Cooling Fan

[bandit]

Wii Cooling Fan
Manufacturer: PEGA
Site: Buy from Brando
Price: $10.00

Overview : Lower your Wii temperature effectively. Make you can play games more smoothly.

Features :

• Lower the temperature of the console
• Use USB power, no extra power adapter is required

Quality/Usability : With todays nex-gen consoles, there are problems with overheating due to the enormous amount of power that is required to power the system. To combat this situation 3rd party companies are releasing cooling fans to cool off your consoles.

The Wii Cooling Fan uses both USB ports of on the back of the Wii. But dont worry, the cooling fan has a pass-through port that allows you to use a USB port if needed. There is no power switch as this is automatically powered on once the Wii is turned on. There is a green LED on the cooling fan to let you know that its on.

The cooling fan has a fan similar to that found on your computer tower but a smaller version. The cooling fan is approximately 3.5" (h) x 1" (d) x 2" (w).

Once plugged in and the Wii powered on, the fan automaticallyl starts. It would of been nice if there was some form of covering to prevent dust from entering such as the dust cover. The fan itself is pretty strong and a good amount of wind is entered and at the same time, a bit too loud. The loudness of the fan overpowers the sound from the TV unless you have your TV's volume put on "deaf".

Conclusion : Overall, the Wii Cooling Fan is a great product and blends in perfectly with the Wii. After playing with the Wii for 3 hours straight, the Wii was still rather cool compared to not having the fan at all. As mentioned above, my only two complaints is how loud it is and the lack of a dust cover. But for the price, its a great buy.

Images via comments

[Kramer]

Hmm I dont know why but I want to buy one.

[StormB]

"Make you can play games more smoothly."

Eh?! I know how cooling in a PC can help make things smoother if your chips are running too hot; but the Wii uses a cool-running low-power CPU to start with! I very much doubt this will make a difference to how smooth your games will play!

The only thing it might do is extend the life of the Wii, which fair enough, is a selling point, but I don't expect it would be a massive difference, and I wouldn't say worth $10. Seem like an addon for addon's sake to be honest.

The best thing you can do to extend the Wii's life is sit it on a hard surface (ie, not carpet) to ensure the standard cooling fan can pass air through the vent on the bottom of the unit and underneath the grey stand. Obviously this doesn't apply to horizontal placement.

Nice design though, I'll give them that.

Will

[iniquitous_beast]

Wait, doesn't the wii's default fan EXPEL air from the console. If you tack a fan onto the wii that fights against the wii's fan, then you are only risking harm to your wii. Sounds like a bad idea to me.

[bobbyt]

I have this fan and this fan does in fact EXPEL, so it would NOT work against the Wii's fan if it does that.

This essentailly means there is an inherent problem with this review. You NEVER want a dust cover on a fan that expels air, as all this would do is trap dust inside the device, as apposed to blowing it out...

There is also one downfall not mentioned here. The USB port that is available is located on the right of the fan, meaning any USB devices connected to your Wii will have the cable sticking out to the right instead of facing twards the back...