ThermoElectric cooling / Solid State Cooling

Sup Sup.
I am in the midst of mounting a thermoelectric cooling pad (a.k.a. Peltier pad) to my GPU.

The dimension of the pad is 1/8" thick, by 1.5" by 1.5" in surface area.
(Pad runs on 12V DC, and cools to 5 degrees celcius)

I have the pad between a 4.5" X 4.5" heat-sink, and a 1" thick aluminum plate which will mount to my GPU.

I have just purchased:

Armacell 1/2" R-3 pipe insulation (insulate the block and prevent condensation)
Liquid Electrical Tape (LET)
Weather Tape (for the seam of insulation, tho it has adhesive on both ends)
and some split flex tubing for running my wiring.

The card I am going to mount this to is an ATI x1600XT

As far as I am aware, there is no way to take off the GPU to seal underneath it, so I am going to seal the edges with LET. As well I am going to seal up the surface of the board around the GPU; I am doing this on both sides. (I believe these to be areas for concern where moisture may occur.)

So basically I am using LET to seal up the surface of the board.

I am using the insulation (insulation material is air tight, and I believe it to be thick enough to prevent condensation on even the outside)

I will also seal up all edges where I mount this device, using LET.
As well I am sealing the reverse side of the board with LET, and going to insulate that / seal it with LET around edges.


I am planning to put LET on the tops of the GPU where I see metal exposures / switches or capacitors (whichever they may be, I am not taking any chances.)

Anyone have any input/ advice for this?


I think these pads could be used for extreme laptop cooling? Really!

erm, two questions... what are you useing to cool the TEC? if its anything less than water then you could have issues. and what wattage is it? cos if its not enough then again you could have issues.

ans as per usual, pics are mandatory

As Sam said, anything less than water for cooling the hot side is gonna be iffy.

Also, you should know that you need a lot of clamping force between the TEC and cold plate. A lot more than a regular heatsink would have. You can't just stick the TEC and coldplate between the regular heatsink and the GPU. You need to bolt the sink-tec-coldplate assembly together very very tightly, then bolt that assembly to the GPU.

1" thick coldplate? that could also hinder performance. There are optimal plate thicknesses for different wattages, i believe there's a sticky about that.

do your research very inportant when playing with TEC's

HDCHOPPER said:

do your research very inportant when playing with TEC's

Click to expand...

Yup, at first you think "hey, this is really cheap and i can get great temps" but after some research you end up having to get a PSU,some type of clamp,coldplate and watercooling if you dont already have it.

Make sure you read a lot before you dive in, if you dont you could end up like this.


or

I'm in agreement with the rest here. I develop TECs for various applications, so pick your TEC appropriately to fit the application.

For chip cooling, what you are basically looking for is a heat spreader. A TEC with high heat flux capacity and low delta-T (temperature change) across the TEC. You get an added benefit from the Peltier cooling effect over just using a copper heat spreader. The reason for the low delta-T is you don't want to get below the dew point (create condensation).

You are in essence making the chip cooler, but now you have more heat being presented to the heat sink. This is why Sam and other said you can not get away from using a water cooling loop to remove the heat from the heat sink. If you don't, you heat flux drops off and you've made a nice little insulator for you chip. You must look at the heat transfer of the system as a whole.

and btw CoolIT has a laptop TEC cooler out thier allready but it looks like a docking station