New OUYA Update Solves the Overheating Issue

**Ayrik** · 05-30-2013

When running as normal, the device doesn't even need a fan. It's just a tablet board and tablets don't have fans either. Anyway, you can just open up the OUYA and disconnect the fan if you want. Though it is not recommended by OUYA (or logic in general).

**macharborguy** · 05-30-2013

I dont have my OUYA yet, but does the board inside of it look as though it could take a bigger heat sink (and/or that the current heat sink could be removed)?

An after-market GPU fan I got for my AMD GPU included a bunch of smaller heat sinks that ended up being extras, so I took one of them and connected it to my Raspberry Pi, which has allowed me to get more stability out of the unit when highly overclocked. While I am not sure at the moment how I would overclock the OUYA (or if i wanted to), having a slightly larger heat sink could also help with heat issues, possibly reducing the number of times it would have to turn the fan on and off.

**alo** · 05-30-2013

I would've thought just taking the motherboard out the box and leaving it open to the air would be sufficient. As Ayrik mentions it's a tablet chipset so the thermal design point is minuscule compared to anything GPU-wise that you're used to.

**vferg** · 05-30-2013

Not sure why everyone seems so concerned about the fan sound. It really makes near zero noise at all. Only time I have heard it is in absolute silence like after playing a game and go back to the main menu. Update seemed to have helped so far but tonight when playing with others for hours on end with a higher resource intensive game will really tell if it is fixed.

**Magnesus** · 05-30-2013

Originally Posted by dhaxe

I think that would be some dangerous business trying to do that. It would work for maybe the first few days, but with no fan running to cool it down, the heat sink would eventual evaporate away laying waste for the heat to play around and melt what ever it feels like within the system. End up with no connections because of cracked soldering.

In tablets Tegra3 runs at the same frequency without a fan. I'll probably test it if there is an easy way to disconnect the fan - monitoring the temperature during such test should make it 100% safe. I would do that with the case open though, it might block the air too much (and with the heat sink at top). And some CPU tweaking might be required (downclocking or changing the governor). The heat sink can't just evaporate, I hope you were joking.

**macharborguy** · 05-30-2013

Originally Posted by Magnesus

In tablets Tegra3 runs at the same frequency without a fan. I'll probably test it if there is an easy way to disconnect the fan - monitoring the temperature during such test should make it 100% safe. I would do that with the case open though, it might block the air too much (and with the heat sink at top). And some CPU tweaking might be required (downclocking or changing the governor). The heat sink can't just evaporate, I hope you were joking.

Yes, but that is with Tablets. keep in mind that during the campaign OUYA (the company) said that they were working with NVidia to optimize the Tegra3, especially for non-battery, non-tablet usage. Wether they actually did that or not remains to be seen

**Magnesus** · 05-30-2013

There is no indication whatsoever that they did anything in that regard. The chip is not overclocked that's for sure.

**macharborguy** · 05-30-2013

Originally Posted by Magnesus

There is no indication whatsoever that they did anything in that regard. The chip is not overclocked that's for sure.

and just to validate my post (and prove to at least myself that I wasn't imagining things). This is from Update #1 on the kickstarter project page, under the part saying "so here's what we're doing now..."

NVIDIA is also helping us maximize the performance of our Tegra 3 chips -- they’ll work even better than the demos you see online. We’ll be able to support some intense games.

**Shireman** · 05-30-2013

Seems to have fixed mine. After the broken update the console would power off after only a few minutes of on time. After this latest update I was able to play for about half an hour before I turned it off myself. Unfortunately I dont have time right now to test it longer but so far so good.

I figured if the problem was overheating the worst thing I could do was to keep running it so it sat untouched waiting for a reply from support and today I noticed this thread so I gave it a shot and so far so good.