peltier heat loop - dreams of a noob

as anyone new to water cool should do, I've been sifting through the wealth of knowledge on ocforums plotting and scheaming about water cooling my system. So far I think i've got all the basics down, but as is typical of anyone with no practical experience, I want to try something a little different. For my system the point of watercooling is to get rid of noise. At the moment I don't need to overclock, so I don't need to do any crazy sub-zero cooling or anything like that, basically I just want to eleminate fans. I've looked at the passive cooling systems, and I think it's a good idea, but they are way to clunky and just plain ugly.

What I've been thinking about is fabricating a smaller passive heat sink/res and finding a way to trap the heat in it longer to make up for the smaller size. Best way I can see to do this would be to use a peltier to transfer heat from the out side of the res back to the in side (thus making a loop). Basically the loop would look like this starting from res/heat sink: res -> peltier cold ->system components - pelter hot -res. I figure at the peltier points I'd just put a water block that sandwhiches the peltier to transfer the heat. If I've got this right I'd just need to make sure the res/heat sink is capable of lossing a little more heat the system components and the peltier add to the hot side, and I should be able to cool things down with out have to use a traditional radiator and fan, and with out have to strap something that looks like a frying pan or a grain silo to my machine.

So sages of the OCforum, have at that. Let me know if you think this is even possible, or done before, and then you can proceed with knocking my newbie head out of the clouds.

|wm|

That will not work period. You are trying to cheat basically. The heat has to go somewhere and in your loop it won't go anywhere. In a water cooling the heat goes from the blocks through the water to the radiator and then the radiator has fans blow cold (relative to the water cooling loop) air and the heat goes into the room. In your loop the heat would add to the water and your water will try and boil but it won't since its a closed loop so the heat will stay with your components and they will fry. If all of that confused you then lets leave it at your components will die from your idea.

WELCOME TO THE FORUMS

It will not work as he said because you are basically trying to cool the hot side of the peltier and the systems components with the cold side of the peltier. I don't think a heatsink on the res could take enough heat away to cool the water very much at all.

You would be better off getting a low (air) restriction radiator and put some quiet fans on it.

Just get a BIXIII and put 3 nexus fans (I think those are the silent ones) and you will hardly hear anything, and you could even get a fan controller to only have one on if you leave your comp idling all night

Most peltier users use a secondary power supply to power their peltiers. Correct me if I'm wrong peltier users, but the secondary power supply itself has a fan, which negates your goal of silence.

If you are only after silence, there are a couple of large heatsinks on the market that work well with quiet 120mm fans, like the nexus recommended above and their yate loon cousins. Becareful, quietness is a very subjective thing. I've come to the conclusion that a lot of hardcore OCers here have busted their ears after too many years of polyfan usage. They may tell you that a Sanyo Denki is very quiet (relatively), but that may be compared to their 6 Delta 32mm thick monsters that they have strapped ont their 3x120mm radiator.

The new Antec P180 case also looks very nice if you do not want to make too many modifications. It apparently is not a beginner's case though. I will be getting one myself.

polonator: you are right they do need another psu however you can make that silent with sufficient modding.

Also his idea will not work because it breaks the laws of science and nothing more. The idea of a large rad with low power fans is probably the best solution assuming he has a quiet pump also.

thanks for the advice all. I know that's a strange idea, but I thought it would be worth a mention. To make sure I'm making myself clear, I think this is more of a bend to the laws of science than a break. Maybe I wasn't clear about the res/heat sink component. Basically think of it as one of those passive cooling systems (such as the Zalman Resorator 1, etc) but at half the size, but running the heat through it twice as offen. I think really the idea ends with a more specific discussion of how fast the res/heat sink can disapate heat vs. how quickly heat would build up in the loop...and frankly that's beyond my means as I would have no idea how to discover that on a custom fabricated component. Iit seems obvious that it's not been something that's been done before, so I think i'll say that that thousands of modders can't be wrong, go with a more traditional set up, and save my gear. Thanks all.

at least you had an idea

I tried something like that once, Just to see if i could cool the water better. The only exception was the hot side of the Pelt was cooled by a Heatsink and fan. The only thing that happened was the water eventually became warmer I guess the Heated air from the fans was absorbed by the res. heating the water.

Basicly what others have said, get a large radiator, quiet pump and fans and watercool. If you watercool correctly, you can have a system that has two or three *silent* fans, total. My current system is just cooling the CPU at the moment but the noise drop from that was dramatic, so much so that my chipset fan is THE loudest fan in my system. Eventually I'll have my powersupply and video card watercooled also, which will bring my systems total fan number to around 3(1 fan for when parts inside the PSU get too hot, can't watercool it all). My northbridge will mostly rely on the pressure differental for cooling.