There is an easy solution to increase the volume of air that can pass through the Amiga 4000 by removing the closely spaced fins at the back of the PSU and replacing them with some perforated steel of aluminium. If one want to it is also possible to replace one of the connectors and increase the space for air to flow through more.

I have not been able to find a large sheet of thin perforated steel or aluminium so I could not open up the Amiga PSU as much as I wanted to at the backside.

I would never trust an open power supply so running it without any kind of protection at all was out of the question. An 80 MM fan finger guard did the trick, it had to be cut down a bit but it just fit the gaping hole. In order to securely attach it to the PSU I used strong epoxy glue and also screwed it down in one of the corners left.

I think the result look relatively professional considering I did not use any precision tools at all. I will of course do an update to this mod in the future when I find better perforated aluminium so I can enlarge the ventilation hole a bit more.

As a side note I have been thinking of replacing the power supply in the Amiga 4000 with an ATX power supply which I know will fit. But considering that the PSU in the A4000 is a structural part of the case and that I really find the solid on/off switch a professional touch to the whole system I much prefer the standard unit. Some have replaced the power supply in the Amiga 4000 by mounting PC parts inside the original steel enclosure, but then you are still left with the problem with finding a way to make the on/off switch work.

Now we leave the power supply in the Amiga 4000 and take a look at the PPC card inside the Amiga.

Last week I found a bunch of neat green anodized heatsinks made by ZEROtherm –ZH100- designed for VGA FETs on  modern PC graphics cards such as ATI 4850/Nvidia8800+. There were sixteen heatsinks inside the package in different sizes so I thought it would be a perfect to cool down specific components inside my Amiga systems. I think these heatsinks are great for that kind of application because it is quite difficult to find small heatsinks, and it can get real expensive fast if ordering large amount of heatsinks in different sizes from professional electronic dealers. The only problem I found with the heatsinks where the varying shades of green the different heatsinks had, some where crystal clear and had an intense color while other had a more bland shade of green. While it won’t make any difference to its function (actually a black anodized heatsink is more efficient IIRC) it is a bit disturbing if you strive for perfection as I am.

Check this out BTW, it is the DCE scandoubler and flickerfixer from my A1200 which got an Indivision AGA now, it is a bit of a tight fit in the A4000 close to the daughter card but finally I have a scandoubler in my AmigaOS4 system (yes you can run PPaint under OS4 classic in AGA resolutions).

And speaking of OS4 classic, I am going to end this blog post with an image that clearly displays how the operating system has behaved for me today :(

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