This simple mod is mainly for people who feel that their router is getting a little too hot for comfort or maybe it keeps crashing. Most routers fail because of extreme casing temperatures and others fail because they simply lack ram capacity. If you are not experiencing any of these symptoms, just forget it. It won’t make your internet connection go faster or latency to drop. If you’re feeling a little paranoid about overheating routers etc, continue reading =).

What you’ll need.
- A Linksys WRT54G/GL/GS equivalent router
- An 8cm 12V fan ( you can get if from your casing fan / PSU fan or simply buy it )
- A little soldering and drilling skills.

-Get the router open and have a look at your router!
-Mark the position of the fan and get your drill ready.
-Drill the holes. I’ve added extra vents at the side to ease airflow.

- It ain’t easy to get the holes made for me.. I seldom drill stuff haha. Anyway make sure that you’ve drilled the holes for the screws to secure the fan in place and also for the wires to go through. Don’t bother much about the ugly edges because the fan would be covering it later on.

-Then, solder the fan wires according to the picture above. Alright, I know this isn’t the perfect soldering but bigger is better right? =P As long as it doesn’t touch the other pins.

-Here’s the naked Broadcom BCM5352 processor and ram chips of the router. If you’d like a better performance cooling, you’d be better off slapping on a few heatsinks on the processor, memory chips and the radio chip on top of the active cooling by the fan. I did not have my thermal grease with me so I skipped that step.

Fix everything back together and there you have it, an active cooling system for the Linksys WRT54G/GL/GS. Let’s simply overclock the processor from 200mhz to 250mhz.

No problems at all. Pushing the radio power a little higher wouldn’t hurt this baby either.

If you would like to have some control on the fan speed, just add in a variable resistor in the circuit. Adding a switch would also be nice as the sound from the fan gets quite annoying at times. I’m considering to add some diodes and the switch after a few hours running. You could even add led lights, thermal sensors to adjust the fan speed according to the case temperature.. But well, this is the simplest fool proof method to add a fan to the router. It looks pretty good too!

Retail Snow Leopard Installation on Gigabyte GA-G31-ES2L with ATI HD4670 QE/CI.
- A simple guide on how to get Snow Leopard running on your hackintosh.

Unlike others, this method does not require a Mac machine prior to installation.

What you’ll need.
-  A retail Snow Leopard $29 DVD Disc
- An Intel Core Duo/Core 2 Duo/Core 2 Quad/Core i5/Core i7 processor
- Gigabyte G31M-ES2L Rev 1.x F10
- >1 GB RAM (you wouldn’t want to run it if you have less than this)
- Sapphire ATI HD4670 card
- SATA HDD
- Prasys – Empire EFI v1.085
- 64bit VoodooHDA drivers (for 2 channel sound)
- Netkas EFI 10.5 bootloader
- Mac OS X 10.6.2. combo update
- Beta Universal 46xx drivers

and all the other necessary drivers for your other devices.

Let’s get started.

• Download the Empire EFI iso and get it burned onto a rewritable/writable CD.
• Assuming that your pc has the HD4670 in it already, boot up the Retail Mac OS X Snow Leopard DVD by replacing the Empire EFI cd with it and press F5 to refresh the bootloader. Boot -x because you’ll get a kernal panic if it is booted normally.
• Load up the setup and format your hard drive with the GUID partition. Proceed with installation until it comes to halt where it says there’s something wrong with the startup disk. Ignore that and reboot.
• Boot up the Empire EFI disk again because we have yet to install Chameleon. Start -x and configure your hackintosh. After configuring, switch it off and pull out the HD4670. We’ll use the integrated GMA 3100 now.
• Start the pc and boot up normally. Install the 10.6.2 update. Then run the “Post-Installation” folder in the Empire EFI disc then run MyHack. Select “com.apple.plist , graphics enabler, legacy apple rtc, nullcpupowermanagement,open halt restart, platformuuid. Install that and then replace your boot file with netkas boot file. After that, install the beta universal 46xx drivers. Shut down. Fix the HD4670 back into position.
• Now with Chameleon installed, you’ll no longer need the Empire EFI disc. Keep that aside for future usage. Boot up with -pci1 .  Notice that now Snow Leopard is able to boot up with the ATI card showing only 256mb and no qe/ci support. Fixing disc permissions could solve this issue but you could also do this method below

Launch terminal and key in the following
sudo -s
(type password)
cd /System/Library/Extensions
chown -R root:wheel *
chmod -R 755 *
kextload ATIRadeonX2000.kext
kextload ATI4600Controller.kext

• Reboot with -pci1 and now you’ll have full QE/CI support with Snow Leopard displaying 512MB video memory.
• To enable 2 channel audio, add the VoodooHDA.kext file into /System/Libary/Extensions and then do this in terminal.

  sudo chown -R root:wheel /System/Library/Extensions
  sudo chmod -R 755 /system/library/extensions
  sudo diskutil repairpermissions /volumes/NAMEOFHDD
  sudo touch /System/Library/Extensions

• Run the 64bit prefpane and reboot.

There you have it, a fully workable hackintosh PC. I know there are many other shorter methods out there, but this is how I’ve done mine and it works. Basically, this is a compilation of the many many methods available with trial and errors.

This guide only brings you to a workable Snow Leopard but you’ll have to figure out how to enable 7.1 surround and make this thing sleep. Yes, its on steroids now and once you set it to sleep, it sleeps forever. Perhaps installing sleepenabler.kext would work, but I’ve not tried that yet. Note that there is the CMOS error when it is booted up. Messing with the DSDT will fix this problem. It won’t be explained here though.

Here’s a benchmark I did on this rig. You can compare the results with the other macs here.
Nowhere near the MacPros though =P

And a video of the hackintosh performance. You’ll notice that it starts to suffer when more than 100 web browsers are fired up.