what the heck is a peltier exactley?

[soundfx4]

Well, just what the subject says. what is it? How effective is it, and are there any problems that they have or anything?

[donny_paycheck]

Originally posted by soundfx5
Well, just what the subject says. what is it? How effective is it, and are there any problems that they have or anything?

A Peltier is a small wafer-like device that is basically a solid-state heat pump. You give it power and without motion one side gets cold and one gets hot, the hot side heated by the heat sucked off the cold side - if that's not too confusing! You put the cold side to a cold plate and the cold plate to your CPU core and whammo, cold CPU.

Peltiers are so named because they operate on the Peltier effect which is what occurs when two dissimilar materials are placed next to each other with an electric current running through them. They're also called TECs (thermocouple electric coolers). They're small, simple in operation, powerful and have no moving parts so they're perfect for cooling CPUs for overclocking or just in general. There are three things to be concerned with when implementing a TEC cooling scheme in your PC:

1. Condensation - when the TEC drops the cold side below the dew point then you're gonna get water droplets condensing on your CPU and mobo unless you seal it vapor-tight.

2. Proper heat dissipation - TECs move heat from the CPU to the heatsink, so make "DARN" sure that your heatsink can dissipate the heat sufficiently, otherwise go to something else like water cooling.

3. TECs use TONS of electricity, so make sure you have a suitable power source to give them the 12-16vdc they need to operate or you'll have a cooked CPU. The internal case PSU isn't always good enough for this.

As you can see from my signature I use one although it's new in there and no problems yet. I've used 'em before too (on an old Pentium-60 at 6v), so I don't expect any problems from my current setup. Just make sure the TEC wattage is high enough to suck the heat away from the CPU. Most Tbirds dissipate about 80 watts or so of heat so make the TEC significantly higher than that to compensate for effeciency and a margin for error too.

I hope I got everything but I probably didn't....lemme know if you've got more questions.

[donny_paycheck]

Ok here's a link on how to prevent condensation. I used this exact method and it worked perfectly....http://www.octools.com/index.cgi?caller=articles/socket_condensation/intro.html