Mod a Router with a 80mm fan

About a year ago, me and my roommate bear24rw were looking for a suitable router for our house. We came upon this Rosewill router. It was cheap, gigabit, and had wireless N. When reading the reviews, we saw that most of the bad reviews were from the router overheating. We decided to get it anyways. When we plugged it in, this thing was scorching hot after a few minutes of being on. We took it apart to see what we were dealing with. We dremeled a hole on top of the heat sinks to try and get maximum efficiency out of the air cooling.


We then used a multimeter to find a 12v power. I had a 80mm blue led fan laying around from a computer build. We cut, soldered, and mount the fan onto the case.






It has almost been a full year and this thing hasn't failed yet. It is also quite cool too. I recently cleaned it, and dremeled some more holes at the bottom to increase the air flow so it doesn't fill with dust anymore.

After a while the router was struggling from over usage. There are 4 people in my house that are heavy Internet users and this little guy couldn't handle the load. We had to constantly reset it. We have since upgraded to using a tower with pfsense on it. The Rosewill router is used for dedicated wireless now.