kirk_m,
NorthWay and
Oldsmobile_Mike - thank you for all of your inputs and for sharing your own experiences. kirk_m - I think you misinterpreted my original post. Those photos I posted aren't mine, and fortunately not I can't take credit work the modification that has been made to that PSU. Like I said, I found that particular solution way too "hacky" for my personal taste. Since I was looking for a more elegant solution, I reached out here for some ideas.
NorthWay - I sort of went down the same route you've taken. Instead of opting for a 4 pin Molex, I chose the 2 pin variant (also known as "Tamiya plugs" - a matching pair was around €2.53 at an R/C hobby shop). The replacement fan in question is the
PureWings 2 by
Be Quiet! (around €9.65). Just like the A3000's stock fan, it's a 12V 80 mm fan. After a bit of tinkering, cleaning my dust-ridden PSU and installing Kickstart 3.1.4 in the process, I managed to get everything back together in working order. I can't stress the difference enough - with Commodore's old fan out of the way, the most noisy component of my A3000 is now the SCSI disk by far.
For anyone interested in seeing parts of the process, here are a few photos I took of said surgery!
Oh, and to anyone who comes across this post looking for the same solution I did - just like others have already mentioned in this thread, the Amiga 3000's original fan does suck air out of the case (and not the other way around). Closer inspection of the fan Commodore chose reveals that the direction of the air flow is shown on the fan by a tiny arrow. To make sure that the replacement fan spins in the same direction, be careful to:
- Hook up the new fan to the right wires (i.e. red wire from the A3000 PSU to the wire that connects to pin 1 on your new fan, and blue wire from the A3000 PSU to the ground wire from the new fan).
- Mount the new fan in the right direction - again, the air flow arrow should be pointed outwards.