Peltier?

[Oneiron]

I have been OC'ing my different CPUs for many years now... and most of the tech talk in here makes sense to me. A little difficult for me in the beginning since I'm norwegian, but I can tech talk with the best of them now. :D
But one thing I have never understood is peltier. This is some kind of hardware, I know... but what does it do? The reason why I'm a little confused about the peltier is that as far as I know this thing produces heat? I don't get that since my birdy can do just fine on it's own on the heat bit. ;)

[i12bina3]

i dont understand that thing either :) but i do know that it uses lots and lots of power ... if your psu is under 300w forget it, you cant put it in ... so i heard ...

[Wa11y]

A peltier is a cooling device actually. But you cannot make one thing cool without making another thing hot. In the case of peltiers, one side gets really cold, and the other side gets really hot. So you put the cold side against your CPU and the hot side against your water block or other heat sink, to wick the heat away. It gets your CPU colder than watercooling or air cooling. I think Danger Den (www.dangerden.com) has some Pelts you can look at.

[SickBoy]

The thing about pelts is you need to have one which the rating is double the watts your CPU puts out. E.g. a Duron 700 stock puts out about 50 W so you would need a 100W pelt. You need dang good cooling to use a pelt too - any peltier over about 80 W requires watercooling. You'd also need to seal your CPU socket with silicone to prevent condensation. All in all, I think they're more effort than they're worth.

Sickboy

[TechnoFile]

Pelts were really effective in cooling Celerons and other "early" overclocked chips.... they never generated much heat anyway(copmared to the chips of today). A peliter(or Thermo Electric Cooler) basically consists of Two ceramic plates, sandwiched in between are little "couples" - pairs of dissimilar metals. The Thing works (I still think its magic) when current is passed through the unit. One side actually gets cooler and the other side gets hotter. There are some problems with pelts - as they transfer heat from the cold side to the hot side, they generate a bit of extra heat themselves. That means if you wand to cool your chip from 40° to 30° you've actually got more than that 10° of heat to try to dissipate. Also the more extreme pletiers- 100+Watt - use voltage's in the range of 15-18volts, and finding/building a power supply that can handle 5 to 10 amps at that current is rather expensive... Of course there are ways, but I personally decided that it was just too big a pain and just went the plain and simple water-cooling route.

Hope that helps!