Peltier Cooling

Praetor

Administrator
Staff member
Anyone have any personal experience with Peltier coolers? I was thinking of the Thermaltake SubZeroG coolers (possibly as a midway between pure forced air and Vapor cooling which i dont think i have the money for right now).
 

4W4K3

VIP Member
i have no PERSONAL experience but i had a friend who had a kit for his PC a while back b4 he got water cooling....but anyways i dont know much..why did i even pst???? lol...did you plan on making your own setup or just going with that Thermaltake kit? for peltiers i think kits tend to work better than custom setups...especially for n00bs like me lol.
 

Praetor

Administrator
Staff member
1. Copper all by iteself is a very good material at "absorbing heat from a source".

2. Copper by itself is very poor at passive dissipitation (in most cases, exceptional, custom designed heatpipes and heatsinks aside). That's why we need fans to go with the heatsink.

3. As a chip gets hotter and hotter, we cannot remove the heat fast enough from the rest of the heatsink, the heatsink will "fill up" with heat and lose its ability to "absorb more" (i.e., lose it's efficiency).

4. The best way to alleviate this is to have a bad-ass monster CPU fan (i.e., loud -- which i like). Of course a bad-ass fan only raises the threshold temperature of the copper before it starts to lose its efficiency.

5. By using a peltier, it is possible to eliminate (or at least reduce) the effect of cumulative heat with coppper: unlike a plain copper setup, the peltier will continue to suck heat away from the CPU regardless of the the CPU's temperature thus giving the copper HSF (a) a much higher threshold before it loses its effectiveness and (b) a side-effect of the peltier effect is that, as one side (the CPU) gets warmer, the other side (peltier) respondes by getting cooler. So therefore, we simultaneously raise the efficiency of copper (without introducing noise, which is a bonus for a lot of people) as well as provide a degree of inheirent cooling.

6. Of course the (performance) downside is that Peltiers have a tendency to drain massive amounts of power (especially on bootup where they can easily suck 200W+ from a PSU). What I was looking for was some comparisons of systems where people had peltiers and (a) what kind of device load was on the computer and (b) how big of a PSU they had

:)
 
Top