Peltier thermoelectric cooling

I know a couple guys who've used it. It draws some serious power, I know that much.
 
I've looked into this a few years back when I was building my rig. Draws a lot of power, but ultimately behaves much like a regular heatsink in that it is very limited by ambient temperatures. The whole point of it, as you probably know, is to use electricity to create a temperature gradient in the system. Since basic thermodynamics tells you that heat travels from hot to cold, you need to do work in order to make it go from cold to hot. However, you still need to cool the "hot end" of the system. This is once again limited by ambient temperature and fans. Quite honestly, it is not worth the price.

edit: It would be really cool if they could create a heatsink where the top of the processor sits in a vacuum. That would cool very well :p
 
Basically as above...
it's a pretty cool setup to have, you can stack the coolers on top of each other to achieve some serious cooling. but ultimately you have to vent the heat to somewhere, and that'll usually still be inside the case.

you can add peltiers to water cooled setups to increase their cooling capacity. (it increases the heat taken away from the chip, and you'll be venting the heat outside thee case -assuming your radiator is outside the case).


edit: It would be really cool if they could create a heatsink where the top of the processor sits in a vacuum. That would cool very well :p
ummm... not really.

in regular air cooling from a heat sink will be by two methods, radiation, and heat is conducted to the air.

if you were to remove all the air from around the heatsink there would be no air to dissipate the heat into. -i.e you'd actually remove the biggest source of heat transference. -and get worse cooling.
 
It's one of these things that sounds great in principle until you actually start to use the thing. It's not that it's limited by ambient temperatures so much, and yes it can get seriously cold on one side if you apply enough power. But to do that it also gets seriously hot on the other side, and it does this by consuming a serious amount of power!

Unless you've actually got equipment specifically designed to dissipate this much heat to outside the case (and that's hard) you're pretty much guaranteed to cook everything else over time...
 
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