pelts: on the chip vs. chilling the water

I read so much about people putting pelts between the waterblock and cpu - why do people do this rather than use the pelts to chill the water? I can see a couple advantages to doing this. You would be chilling all of the components that have waterblocks, rather than just the cpu. If you were going to chill other components anyway, you could have one bitter pelt instead of a couple smaller ones. There are probably factors that I'm not considering, but any thoughts on the matter?

For a chillier peltier, you'd need a tremendous heatsink on the peltier (Large Swifty and a tornado for high wattage), and it may not be very efficient. This would also bring noise up considerably, not usually a plus when you want to watercool.

I would like to see a resevoir with:
A) Copper Block in the middle extending from side to side
B) Peltier at one end of the copper block (I'm not familiar with how powerful a peltier you may need?)
C) Swiftech + Panaflo, as you may be able to get by with a lower-powered pelt than a P4 requires?

The reason is that a peltier has a hot side and a cold side. The hot side needs to be cooled or the cold side will never get cold. To chill the water, you would have to cool the other side of the peltier with another cooling system. This doesn't sound too efficient, so i'm guessing that's why people don't do it.

Peltiers generate a LOT of heat. For example, a 226w TEC will pump out 226w of heat on the hot side, PLUS whatever heat the cpu is putting out.

The heatsink for the pelt shouldn't need to be any larger than the radiator that you would be using anyway, should it?

I have a waterchiller that can get my coolant down to about -15C under full cpu/gpu load. When I run just my chiller I get about 6-10C at load. With my 226W pelt on as well I get -35C idle and about -10C load. I think that sums up my reason for using a pelt on the cpu. BTW my waterchiller is a modded dehumidifier not a TEC chiller.....they just can't keep up

Steve

Hey mrspec what'd that dehumidifyer cost ya, how long did you work on it, and what's your power bill?

How does one go about modding a dehumidifier?

I would love to see a journal on the modding of that dehumidifier.

Nick Burns said:

I would love to see a journal on the modding of that dehumidifier.

Click to expand...

Yes I'd be very interested myself...

As the TEC is fairly inefficient in cooling, loading it down with more components that generate heat + the cpu will usually kill the performance of even the largest common TEC the 226W.

Then, when you are up to using 2 or 3 TECs to cope with the extra heat you've broken the budget for sure... then comes the electricity bill... Yikes!

Well, there are numerous success stories about TEC waterchillers but they don't come easily. You need beefy cooling of the TECs. Also the pumpheat is added to the TECs hotside for a waterchiller, that lowers the performance a little further.

But still, it's doable.

Still you'll get equal or better performance from stripping old fridges and re use the parts making a phasechanger waterchiller. a bit clumsy yes, but cheaper both buying and running.

TECs are sweet devices though... neat, quiet, easy to maintain, easy to adapt.

Phasers are better, efficient. But... bigger, hot, clumsy, sensitive, not all are made for 24/7 use.

Bender has sold some modified TEC water chillers that run on 12V 50A because there is 10 peltiers to cool the water. Thundr7 is using one of Bender's chillers here.

http://forum.oc-forums.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=229562

http://forum.oc-forums.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=229462

http://forum.oc-forums.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=225959

http://forum.oc-forums.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=227572

Nick Burns said:

I would love to see a journal on the modding of that dehumidifier.

Click to expand...

I am pretty sure MrSpec3, used the Rotor method, found HERE, but Rotors sites is down for some unknown reason (probably making a nicer lookin' one)