On my X96 x3 I just removed the tin heat shield, removed the plastic standoff in bottom of case.
I put on an old 30mm cpu ally one with an insulator bit on one corner so it didn’t short out adjacent components using original heat pad.
Put some 5mm rubber feet on each bottom corner.
Added about 12 x 3mm holes on top to allow air convection.
Left cpu at performance.
Temps dropped from 75c to 58c watching an blue ray rip.
Prev cpu would drop to 1400, now stayed at 1900 
Very happy.
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I’ve seen two of your mods, one with gigabyte copper heatsink on top of 3mm thick thermal pads and open case upside down, the second you made a white fan enclosure, have you done another mod?
also what does “30mm cpu ally one with an insulator bit on one corner so it didn’t short out adjacent components using original heat pad.” mean?, I plan to add a big copper heatsink and replace the thermal pads with
You will need to space or clear other component’s on the pcb.
Mighty impressed with this job and it should ensure it lasts quite a bit longer than stock.
Shoog
Well my cooling job worked well…
Box is now dead!
Or maybe it’s PSU, cba to check- will do eventually. Other things going off rather than watching telly
Hello.
My simple way of cooling.
It is important to get the heat out of the box. The best thing is the breeze.
Temperatures dropped by more than 15 celsius. Powering the fan from the USB 5V pin board. Small speed - absolutely quiet.
Probably the best way to cool the X96 Max + …
because the simplest and at the same time effective. 
Does it stops when poweroff with the remote? I did the same with a Magicsee N5 but remains conected and working when I use the remote’s power button to turn off and I have to unplug the power cable. Any idea for this? thanks!!
I connected the fan to the flat joint as in the picture. Your box may not turn off 5V to USB when the box is turned off. Try to measure the power supply on the second USB port with a multimeter when the power is off. Or look for a 5V board that gets lost when the box is turned off.
Try it. SD reader power supply. Check with a multimeter first.
Thanks for the info friend. I’ll try to find. Very usefull
Hi guys,
I made also one modification,
I used 120mm cpu fan and transfered to usb powered one.
I drilled holes in bottom and upper case in my X96 Air, added some cpu thermal paste and under 2hrs load of full HD movie - on wifi I got max 60°C
A better test would be to run some HD video that is software decoded (disable hardware decoding in settings for testing) because that puts the strain on the processor and heats it maximally.
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without hw acceleration I got 76°C, but it was too laggy to use box without hw acceleration
Yes its lagging, use software decoding only for testing 
Drill larger holes to improve air flow thus lowering the temperature.
IIRC the processor on these boxes is mounted on the under side of the board. If so turn the box upside down, so that processor faces upwards.
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Has anyone done the math on how high of a CFM you could get running an 80mm fan on 5v? Or if there is any 80mm fans designed to run on 5 volts to begin with?
Almost all 12V DC fans will run on 5V but with lower speed/noise. I haven’t found one yet that would not run on 5V.
But if need_for_speed is a must, then get one that is made for 5V like this one.
I have no real requirement for speed at all, my X96 runs at about 65 C under 1080p HD movie load, I just want to cool it down into the low 50s or high 40s if possible. I know 80mm fans are about 4x the flow of 40mm fans, but I don’t know how much stronger they are when they are running at much slower speeds due to having 5v instead of 12v. Not really sure what fan to get.
Frankly I wouldn’t be surprised if a new heat sink + good thermal paste is enough to drop 5 degrees given how bad this thermal setup looks, but if this thread is anything to go off of that usually doesn’t work that well.
Since I hate all sorts of fans for various reasons, mostly because they are annoyingly noisy, I always use passive cooling solutions.
On all my such devices I had, from RPi 1 to S905Xx boxes, I installed some kind of passive cooler with excellent results. Sometimes used oversized coolers that protruded a little out of the box while drilling lots of holes all around the box for adequate air flow.
There are plenty of solutions in this thread to get ideas from…
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Agree, if you are not running some top notch apps on it (which kodi isnt, if you dont do a lot SW decoding), passive should be fine enough.
I found main issues X96 stock heat solution is:
- good CONTACT with the sink
- Closed box tightly around sink
- Maybe size of the sink (I didnt leave metal plate, I just use a small box of aluminium instead). But I think with good contact and space around CPU shouldnt throttle also.
If you solve both issues, you should be totally fine without fan with HW decoding at least using ondemand.
my2 cents
Put it on performance and I guarantee that it will throttle stock.
Shoog