helping you stay protected in the digital age

For videos and different heatsinks see the previous video in this series: http://johndball.dyndns.org:81/wordpress/index.php/2007/12/15/overclocking-and-heat-management-wrt54g-v2/

I purchased a few bricked routers from Dslreports.com’s members at the For Sale forum and got a couple of Linksys WRT54G and GS routers. The WRT54g I got up and running after much coaxing. The GS had FON installed on it. Once I figured out how to navigate the FON firmware I loaded the factory GSv4 firmware on it and then uploaded DD-WRT v24 RC5 (well, after loading the micro version).

The WRT54GS is the main “router” or access point for the second half of this overblown wireless networking project. Hey DD-WRT guys: If you want to interview me for a success story I’ll be more than glad to share how Blaize and I covered multiple city blocks with Linksys routers running DD-WRT… just a thought.

Anyways, I chose the GSv4 because of it’s increased RAM. When I was installing DD-WRT on this router I had both the GS and G next to each other. It took a fraction of the time to get back to the GUI on the GS than the G did! It runs so much faster stock. So, what could I want more from it then? To run it even faster!

Tools Needed:

I started by removing the Linksys plastic housing. Remove the antennas then the plastic housing just pulls apart. WAP54G friends: there might be two screws underneath the rubber “feet” on your AP that need to be taken out first. Next I destroyed my extra CPU heat sink and salvaged the silver blades (the air flows between them). You’ll see why shortly.

I figured out a trick for mounting a heatsink to chips when there is no mounting bracket (please don’t try this on actual processors, you’ll probably end up frying it). What I have done is put a tiny drop of Loctite super glue either on the ends or in each corner of the chip and put a drop of heatsink paste/gel in the center of the chip. The trick is to get enough heat sink paste to dissipate the heat without mixing with the super glue or running over the edges of the chip. That comes with practice. In the picture above the red dots would be super glue and gray center is heat sink paste/gel.

You can see I mounted the northbridge heatsink and one of the blade heat sinks to both the chipset and some random chip that got hot (not the processor at the moment) using the method I mentioned above. Make sure you align the heatsink correctly the FIRST TIME otherwise pulling off the heatsink might take your chip with it!

Here you can see where the chip lies underneath the heatsink. I’ve outlined it in yellow.

And another view with the tools.

I’ve outlined where I placed the super glue and heatsink paste. This by the way is the processor (I’m pretty sure).

Here I have the blades mounted to the processor(?) chip. It is not bent as the picture makes it look. I don’t know what angle I took this picture at but the blades are straight in real life. I also rearranged the wireless antenna cable. The red line is where it was before. I moved it behind the LAN ports so it didn’t sit on the chipset heatsink.

Results
The results are great! I overclocked it to 237 mhz. A “safe” increase. You can theoretically go up to 250mhz and possible more with some other cooling techniques.

250mhz and beyond: http://www.bitsum.com/openwiking/owbase/ow.asp?WRT54G

~ by johndball on December 15, 2007.