Summary

This is an external cooling fan for a fanless Surface Pro. It ended up being more of a hack job than i was hoping for, but maybe someone can be inspired by it.

I like to do some light gaming on my Surface Pro while on the move, however my fanless i5 model gets hot and throttles when pushed to hard. I designed this as a compact solution while traveling. I've recently been playing Dirt Rally and the fan improves my fps from about 55 to 70. In addition my Surface is much cooler, so hopefully now my battery isn't getting cooked to death.

This uses a 50x15mm blower fan and has an integrated usb plug, so the fan can be simply clipped onto the Surface without any extra cables. The fan is relatively quiet running on 5 volts from the usb port. The usb plug was scavenged from an old usb cable. I stripped away the outside rubber/plastic exposing the basic metal plug. I trimmed off the back end of the plug slightly and soldered on my own wires. Unfortunately I don't have any pictures of the modified plug. There is a 8.5x13.5mm rocker switch to control the fan power.

I've tried it on a Surface Pro 4 and 7, so presumably it will work for all models between that