Thread: Phase Cooling example

Phase change is actually not the same as a TEC, or Peltier.
Thermoelectric coolers CAN do a great job but they actually increase the heat load of the SYSTEM. The chip being cooled will be cooler, but the exhaust air will be considerably warmer. A LOT warmer.

Phase Change is the process of compressing a gas to a liquid state and then suddenly releasing it to expand- the sudden expansion (the Phase Change) provides cooling. This is how air conditioners and refrigerators work.
In computing, Phase Change is most commonly put into use as Direct Die Phase Change:
the chamber where the expansion (and cooling) occurs is mounted on the cpu, just like a heat sink. ALL of the refrigerant power is put to use to cool JUST the cpu.
This is VERY effective and can easily result in subzero temperatures under full load.

But in a car computer.... yeah, not so effective. A compressor will either rob engine power (belt driven like car ac) or electric load on the battery- and it will generate a LOT of heat.

Air cooling is definitely the simplest and can USUALLY be done successfully with planning and care, and maybe a few low noise fans.

Water cooling is a bit more complex, but if you are struggling with air cooling, and trying to figure out how to duct intake and exhaust air to keep the system stable, it may not be much more complex.
*Modern pumps add little heat to the system and run on 12v (computer psu.)
*1/2" Inside Diameter tubing is most common in High Performance water cooling, but 3/8" or even 1/4" ID can do a decent job in a system that is not highly overclocked.
And small tubing is easy to route.

A few points though:
Water cooling still depends on Ambient Air to cool the radiator down- it just makes it easy to relocate WHERE you send that warmth.
Water cooling will NOT cool everything in a system like Air Cooling does: only the chips with water blocks will be cooled. (Other components will benefit from the LACK of all that extra heat nearby.)
Some airflow is still required to cool motherboard components such as chipsets, voltage regulators and memory.

just a thought but one upside to using a pelt could be that they're not very sensitive about voltage fluctuations. you could connect it directly to switched power and engine cranks, transient spikes, etc won't kill it.

still probably not worth it considering if you can't air cool a stock a processor cooling the pelts hot side is definately not going to happen.

You should all be using laptop motherboards, if intel core 2 series try the P series which have only 25w thermal design power.

Throttlestop is a great program I use for overclocking my quad above 3.5 but you can also use it to downclock, enable/disable core 2 power saving features which downclock 1/2 or SLFM on some CPUs which will get a 2.4 all the way down to 700mhz. That will stay cool no kidding.

You can also undervolt which will have some serious results with heat. A program called RMclock is better for creating profiles and doing a lot of these things.

All cooling systems need ventilation, preferably very good ventilation. Air systems I would highly recommend designing a fan shroud to force intaking only cool air and directing the hot air both from and to the outside of the enclosure.

Even if you have vents, if your fan is not directed at these vents your enclosure will somewhat be filling up with hot air.

I am aware that a lot of coolers dont work in a way that this would be possible. well, they should. The ones that dont are crappy coolers.

Originally Posted by cla1067

careful with that all. Not everyone uses there computer for the same reasons, some people need certain features, more or less power, limited space or a lot of space, and so on. Some people even have many displays which need to be ran like independent computers on one computer which obviously this would require more graphics cards or maybe even just one graphics card with eye infinity. Also some people only have a certain amount of money to spend or want to add a sound card or graphics card and don't like usb sound cards... Saying "all" is "most" of the time dangerous :/. Look at HiJackZX1 van in the worklog and tell me he should be using a laptop motherboard...

Ok, I'll be careful. It does make sense.

But I'll also say that I could build a superior setup to the one you linked with laptop motherboards.

They do have more than USB you know
And there are ways to use desktop graphics cards with laptops.

Laptop parts can also often be found cheaper than any other parts, because people simply do not have any idea what they are, or what they are compatible with, and in the end have no idea what they're worth.

Yea, non laptop parts are much much easier to work with. For car setups, it seems only natural to me that the preferred parts would be the type initially designed for a very high level of integration.
But I know a lot about laptops which does not come easily, even some incredibly skilled desktop builders will feel lost in some areas with laptops.