best effective cooling solution?

Hm.... I was just wondering what was everyone's opinion on what would get the best cooling for your dollar?

I wanted to enter the peltier world.. because I remember seeing peltiers for like almost the price of a quality heatsink, but you get much lower temps. Then i realized you need a separate power supply.. which costs LOTS....... But then for water cooling you gotta get the pump, radiator, cpu/gpu blocks... etc. Air cooling is cheapest i know, but also the least effective.

So what other cooling solutions are there (no liquid nitrogen ) that an average college student can afford that would be the most effective and why?

thanks

I would just stick to home made water cooling, or good air cooling.

Pelts usually need water coolin also, the hot side of the cold plate gets HOT.

well a good HS and fan is very good and in expensive but lous for twice the price you can get a better/as good watercoolign setup that is ALOT quiter

If cooling per dollar matters, your best bet is air-cooling.

$40 for a slk800
$12 for a 80mm tornado
i assume you have some case fans... if you need a couple more, those arn't that much.

if you can stand the noise, that's what id do. or for another $15-20 you can get the slk900 and a 92mm tornado

I think it all matters on if you can stand the noise, there are good heatsinks and fans that can on par with watercooling (no pelts). So if you can stand noise, I will say get an Alpha 8045 and a Sanyo loud fan, you will getting some low 30C with 1.85Volt on an AMD Athlon XP.

If you can stand the noise and you are not try for a new temp record get yourself a big chunk of Cu heatsink and a high speed fan. If you are not into the noise sceen then I would stick with what you have for now and buying the parts for a water setup, whice what i am doing now since i am also a college student that has no money :-(

i see in your sig that u have AMD.
many AMD users love slk 800 or 900 heatsinks
so if u want good and noisy cooling go for some delta fan or
if u like quiet and average cooling go for panfalo fan

For prolly $100 or so you can get decent water cooling...nothing special but itll work.

Actually, I'd say water cooling is a far better option in every way than air cooling- including price. More likely than not, it will not cost you over $100, but more around $80 or $90. An SLK-800 with a decent fan would cost in the mid $50's, and an SLK-900 in the mid $60's. Water cooling blows both away in cooling ability and noise level. You can actually get quite more than decent watercooling for well under $100, which will perform nothing short of excellent.

Very true Gautam, but as i am myself in a college town it is rather hard to come by the parts for a cheap home made water setup. I am haveing to buy the parts online a few at a time. I am going to assume that -N- is in the same place. Since I work in a computer store I do get the parts cheap from suppliers but if i had to pay retail I think I would quickly fide the needed place to make a home made setup. So -N- if you are going to go water start hunting around for junkyards or used parts stores or something.

Hm.... I was just wondering what was everyone's opinion on what would get the best cooling for your dollar?

Click to expand...

IMO, -N- I would say your best bet is watercooling also, but I myself can't stand fans for $123 you can get a good setup at www.dtekcustoms.com . Shop around, I myself being in college also have a tendancy to be low on cash.

Hope this helps. GOOD LUCK!!

why pay 50 for a kick *** heatsink and fan, when you can spend 70 bucks on a <.1 c/w watercooling setup...

$20 - maxijett 1200
$5 - heatercore from junkyard
$6 - tubing from home depot
$20 - copper stock from onlinemetals.com
$5 - tupperwear resevoir
$.01 - water
$14 - miscellaneous hosebarbs, clamps, etc. from hardware store.


that's how i did it.....

39 C load temps on an athlonxp 1800+ @2025 mhz, 2.0Vcore.

that's the best value, IMO.

OMG that is sweet. what heatercore? Guessing the Cu stock was for your waterblock?

Air is the most effective per dollar, and it is just as good as water basically if it is loud enough.

If you want quiet and high performance you have to go with water. If you want to buy a ready made kit for water you have to spend atleast $150 for a decent one. You can make a very nice one on your own for that much by buying your own parts individually.

A CPU peltier that would be effective on your cpu would require watercooling to keep it cool. A PSU can be picked up online on www.ebay.com or in the classifieds here, and you can save a lot of money that way. There is still the expense of the watercooling though on top of the TEC setup. A TEC is the only way for you to get subambient temps basically, unless you use phase change.

Perhaps you have a fridge you can destroy, and if so then you may have a good solution. You can either put a heat exchanger into the fridge or tear the fridge apart completely and submerge it's cooling coils inside of a resevoir bucket. If you can find a fridge to abuse then this may be the most inexpensive, ghetto solution that can get you subambient temps.