Hmm. I make it ~60 times per minute absolute minimum, but it's going to be even more than that:

According to the FAQ, the sleds dimenions are 2"x7.2"x6.8" = ~98 cubic inches. (The dimensions are all 'max' dimensions, so the players dimension would include more errors because of the fascia being wider/taller than everything else, hence the use of the sleds dimensions.)

1 cubic foot is 1728 cubic inches. Therefore 3.5cfm is 6048 cubic inches per minute.

But, a significant percentage of the empegs volume is filled with miscellania, such as motherboard, display board, hard drives etc..If we estimated this percentage to be 40%, then that leaves approximately 60 cubic inches of air.

So we are probably looking at a figure nearer 100 times per minute.

What about the new magnetic motorized fans with magnets running on the exterior tips of the blades ... supposedly this cuts the noise drastically down....

Greg

Add to that the fact that, if you move it away from the holes, less air actually gets blown out of the casing. When I moved it away from the holes, I couldn't feel any air coming out of them (fan was oriented to move air up and out of the case).

Yes, well, there is a very good reason for that. If the fan casing isn't hard up against the lid then you have to seal the gap up with something don't you. Otherwise you just end up stirring up the air inside the case, especially once the gap is big enough that the resistance to flow through the gap is much lower than the resistance to flow through the holes, which is all a bit pointless really isn't it.

Well, I seem to have solved all my problems by installing the fan in the docking station instead of in the player itself. Everything runs cool as a cucumber now. I'm happy.

Thanks for all the help and suggestions.

Excellent!!!

It actualy hit me back when you posted that you only had heating problems in your home docking station that I didn't see why it would be a problem... Has anyone with heat problems in their car tried installing a fan attached to the docking sled in a car?

Matthew