The Xbox 360 might be the worlds noisiest consumer electronics device, but don’t let it keep you up at night.

With some inexpensive parts and a little bit of elbow grease you can eliminate the noise factor by relocating the console to another area of your house.

In this basic guide I will show you how I put the noisy Xbox 360 that kept me up at night, in the basement on my equipment rack.

Parts List:

1. Xbox 360 with HDMI Output ( You can do this with component or composite cabling as well but you will need to source different wall plates.)
2. Monoprice HDMI over CAT5E/CAT6 wall plates
3. Cat5E or Cat6 Cable, I also suggest Monoprice.com for this as well.
4. IR Extender.  For this the choice is your but I happen to source a few from eBay, they arrived in about 7 business days from Hong Kong and work great.
5. Some time to pull cable through your walls.

Basically the install went as follows.

I pulled 2 Cat5E cables from my equipment closet in the basement up to the attic and down to the bck of my wall mounted LCD TV in my bedroom.  I then pulled a 3rd cat53 Cable to the same location behind the tv.

I connected 2 standard RJ-45 Ends to 2 of the Cat5E cables, and left the 3rd just hanging there for the time being.

I connected the 2 finished cables the back of the Output HDMI wallplate and screwed it to the wall.

I went down to the basement and connected the other end of the 2 wires to the input side of the HDMI wall plate and connected the xbox 360 to the wall plate with a HDMI cable.

Now I just needed to get the IR signal down to the basement which was pretty easy.

I took the Hub unit of the IR kit and attached it to my TV so my remote would have line of site to it.  I took one of the IR Bug cables and cut the headphone plug off of it leaving about 2 inches of wire.

I stripped back the wire and connected it to the 2 of the wires in the 3rd cat5E cable I ran upstairs, I used brown and white brown but you can use whatever colors you wish.

I took the other end of the cut IR Bug cable down to the basement and connected it to the corresponding brown/white brown wires on the 3rd cable in the basement and then attached the bug to the IR window on the front of the Xbox 360.

I went back upstairs, took aim with my Harmony remote and pressed the “watch tv” activity.

Tv powered up the 360 powered up and now I have no more fan noise in my bedroom.

Pictures to follow.

Part 2

© 2009, Technoramblings of the digitally insane. All rights reserved.