Peltier cooling.

churnopol · 06-21-2003, 09:06 PM

Ok i'm suprised not many people know about peltier cooling. Does anybody else use peltier cooling. I dont use it in my carputer, yet (i havent got my motherboard and case in the mail)

But i do use it for my desktop. I can get the temperature down to around -25c to -20c.

If you dont know what a peltier cooler is. It's a white square with two wire sticking out of it. When an electric current passes through it, one side get burning hot while the other side gets extremely ice cold.

Does anyone use this for their carputer?

The only downside for using it in your carputer is that it requires it's own power supply and some can use around 80w - 190w. But if you got a big 450w power inverter like mine

thats not a worry

cproaudio · 06-21-2003, 11:02 PM

Peltier coolers arent every electrically efficient. They basically pumps the heat from 1 side to another. While doing this, it produces its own heat, so you have 2 factors producing heat. I fried my AMD 2000+ using a peltier cooler cuz on the initial start up, the peltier couldnt cool the AMD fast enough and it smoked. Besides my personal bad experience with them, they can cause condensation, super hot heatsink causing the surrounding air to get hot and cause the motherboard temp to get hot. A few years ago I built a water cooled peltier cooler using only a 40 watt cooler as an experiment. I had a one gallon cooler chest that I filled with ice and water as a reservoir. I built a water cooled heatsink out of copper and used a small aquarium water pump to pump water through the copper heatsink. I attached the heatsink on the hotside of the peltier and turned that sucker on. That thing gets freezing cold. I drop a few drops of water on the cold side and it immediately turned into ice. I let it ran for an hour. That little 40 watt peltier cooler managed to turn the chest full of ice water into really warm water. power consumption is not a problem as you can hook it to your car battery and use the 12v rail of the computer's PSU to trigger a relay to feed power to the peltier cooler. Here's more information on peltier coolers.
http://www.heatsink-guide.com/peltier.htm

eCar™ · 06-22-2003, 12:41 AM

Funny that you mention it. I just bought 2 peltiers. I don't know what I'll do with them yet. But they were a good price.

MP3DUB · 06-23-2003, 01:54 AM

Heh, a peltier was one of the many things that i did to my old p3 550 that works to this day! The most incredulous part about that statement was that I hooked the peltier up and ran it on the proc for a while before I realized why you need a coldplate

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