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Taming the Beast – Cooling a Linksys WRT310N Router

This mod came about after I purchased a Linksys WRT310N router for a customer. After using the router during testing I noticed that it became quite hot. This was measured by the mildly scientific method of touching the casing with the back of my hand and feeling the heat output.

These things get quite hot. As many other reviews on the net have pointed out. Google search here

These are available to buy in NZ from CBCNZ

I’ve been a fan of Linksys products for a long time, starting way back with the venerable WRT54G, and still wanted to use a Linksys product for the job I was doing. I probably could have gotten away with using 802.11g but I wanted to try the Draft-N 2.0 goodness.

I decided that I would attempt to cool this beast. Like most of my ideas I went into this one half-assed, without a real plan or any idea how I was going to achieve it.

My initial idea involved mounting a 40mm fan inside the top casing. This proved to be impractical.

It seems that I didn’t try hard enough, someone has managed to fit a 40mm fan on the top of the unit and retain it’s sexy curves. Well done airman

Luckily for me I was helped out immensely by my colleague, Richard. He proposed mounting a fan underneath the router and blowing air upwards through it. This new plan then created its own set of issues : how to mount the router above the fan and still provide airflow?

Enter a broken ATX power supply. Testing proved that the 120mm fan still worked, and the metal fan mount / psu casing we felt could be adapted as a mount for the router.

This seemed to be the best idea but for it to work we would need to drill out the holes on the underside of the casing to provide better airflow. This part proved to be, quite literally, the most boring.

We also decided to run the router for a day and measure the temperate using a probe. This was to establish a baseline for how hot the thing got, and so we could tell if our endeavours had actually worked.

With 3 wireless users hitting it reasonably hard we found that the temperature peaked at 52 degrees Celsius. Although most of the time it sat around 40 degrees.

I also decided to add some extra heat sinks to the board.

As the fan mount lacked any kind of style we painted it. This improved things.

We then mounted the fan and a dust filter.

All we needed to do now was put the case back together and test.

Now it is ready for primetime. The hottest that we have seen it now is 22 degrees Celsius. So it is a significant improvement. Sadly the customer will probably not appreciate all the effort that has gone into modding their router.

List of Ingredients :

1 x Linksys WRT310N Wireless N Router

1 x Old, dead ATX PSU (incorporating working 120mm Fan)

1 x Can of Black Spray-paint

1 x Soldering iron and solder (the fan power comes from the base of the board)

1 x 120mm Dust Filter

Far too much time

Thanks to :

Richard Hansen, for actually building it

Gareth Turner, for looking the other way while we did

Nic Wood, for throwing away the ATX PSU(..fair enough, it was dead)

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