Heat Sinks and Fan for 128DCR - How To with photos.

[Justin]

I went on a bit of a bender modding my 128D for reliability and thought I'd share the ridiculousness a bit.  The Commodore 128D is the fabulous ne plus ultra of 8 bit computers.  An elementary school friend of mine had one of these bad boys, and I remember thinking it was really cool compared to my 64.  It looked very professional with the separate keyboard.  So since it is the coolest computer from my childhood, and the greatest 8-bit computer of all time, it is, by definition, the coolest computer EVAR.  And now I own one.  I rule!

Anyway, considering it took me nearly 4 months to find a decent one and it cost considerably more than I intended to spend, I decided to do some reliability mods.  I had to get inside the thing to cut a trace and solder another so that the built in drive was no longer the first one, and while I was in there I noticed that this, the 128DCR (Cost Reduced) does not have any fans or heat sinks, even though there is clearly a space on the power supply for a fan.  In Europe the regular 128D did have a fan, so Commodore was just cutting costs on this US version.

I originally posted to CBM-hackers about this project. I was of course entertained by Bil Herd's expression of mild surprise: "So it shipped without a fan? When we designed it in '84 we specifically had intake vents on the front and had specified a small (mitsumi?) fan.  They didn't release the D until after I was gone so I don't know what all got added/deleted."  So as suggested, I made my merry way over to newegg and looked for parts that are normally the purview of overlockers.  For about 30 bucks I got a ton of tiny little heatsinks that already had adhesive, and a 60mm fan that moves 10CFM at 8dba...  So it can turn over the volume of the chassis about 10 times a minute and is essentially inaudible.

Attached is a PDF with photos showing the process.  I have much higher resolution photos that I will post separately as attachments.

Here is more or less the same writeup on Lemon.  The Lemon version also has a photo showing the device ID change jumper locations on the motherboard.

http://www.lemon64.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=30963&start=0&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight=

[Justin]

Here is the first batch of high res photos for the process.

[Justin]

And the rest...

[RobertB]

The Commodore 128D is the fabulous ne plus ultra of 8 bit computers.

Yup, I always thought that the C128DCR was the height of C= 8-bit computers.

I originally posted to CBM-hackers about this project. I was of course entertained by Bil Herd's expression of mild surprise: "So it shipped without a fan? When we designed it in '84 we specifically had intake vents on the front and had specified a small (mitsumi?) fan.  They didn't release the D until after I was gone so I don't know what all got added/deleted."

Ooo, C= trivia is always good.

Attached is a PDF with photos showing the process.  I have much higher resolution photos that I will post separately as attachments.

Thanks for that.  I haven't yet heat-sinked my main C128DCR yet (probably because I've never had any over-heating problems with it).  But better to be safe than sorry.  I keep staring at the flashy heatsinks at Micro Center.

             A future project,
             Robert Bernardo
             Fresno Commodore User Group
             http://videocam.net.au/fcug