Water a must with Peltier Cooling?

Is there a peltier avialable that will cool my chip better than air but wont force me to buy a watercooling setup to cool the hot side of the pelt? If I had a good heatsink and fan could I use a ducting mod to take the hot air created by the hot side directly out of the case? And if I could would condensation still be a problem?

It is possable to use air to cool a pelt, you just need your air to be on steroids.

Swiftech makes an air cooled pelt assembly I think. I don't know of any others. Many people use air to cool 80 watt pelts for chipsets and videocards, but I don't know of many that use it for their cpu.

It is entirely possable for it to work, but be ready to have a tornado or two going full out. Maby that GIANT new thermalright heatsink would be up to the job? (the 120mm aluminum one)

As for condensation, it will be a problem whenever you have something going below ambient, which is the whole point of useing a pelt.

OK so what is my best option for cooling if I just want to bring my temps down to ambient? Are we talking about Case temp or the temp in the roon where my case is?

if you dont already have one, a good blowhole or two on the side of the case, opposite the cpu heatsink assembly will bring temps right down. i have 2 and when i run my mobile at stock speed and voltage, its only 2 - 3 degrrees C above ambient on a volcano 12

OK I have a blow hole but will it be enough to cool a pelt?

you will need VERY good airflow to cool the pelt. Something like 4 120 mm fans. The most important part would be the heatsink though. It would have to be a VERY good heatsink. Something like a heatpipe thermalright. I don't think the base on most of the thermalrights is big enough to cover a pelt though so you might need something else. It's possable to cool a pelt with air, but it's deffinatly hard to do and the results won't be great (or quiet)

Your probably best to just use high end air cooling on it's own or build yourself a decent water cooler.

i dont thein that even the mighty sp-94's can handle tec's very well.
i have a 170 watt pelt and i put my sp-94 and an 80mm case fan on it and in about a minute and a half the coldside (that only got down to about 27°F) started warming up.
and the sp-94 was about 140-150°F so basically if you wanted to use anything bigger than an 80watt pelt on the cpu you best way to cool it is with water.
oh and the pelt/sp-94 i was messin with was outside of my case woth no load on the coldside.

~Magick_Man~

What if I had a shroud around my HS and then a duct to take the air right out of my case with a huge 120 sucking the air out?

Something you have to remember:

Whatever is cooling the pelt must soak up all the heat from your processor, PLUS the additional heat of the peltier. Thus, let's say you strap a 178W peltier to your processor, that's putting out 80W on it's own.

80W = Processor heat
178W = Peltier heat
258W = How much your heatsink has to get rid of

Are you seeing that? How many "normal" heatsinks (regardless of number of fans) are able to dissapate 250+ watts of heat? I know of a few heatsinks that can do it, but they'd be the size of your entire computer case.

When you're dealing with an 80W pelt on a video card or a northbridge, your heatsink is dealing with "only" 130-150W of heat output. You can borderline cool that with a bigass sink and plenty of fan power. But 200+ is simply too far out of range for something small enough to sit on a processor.

So what would happen lets say if I had a pelt that was the same watts as the chip? What would the temp be of the chip?

ClarkKent said:

So what would happen lets say if I had a pelt that was the same watts as the chip? What would the temp be of the chip?

Click to expand...

Then the 'coldside' of the pelt would be the same temp as the 'hotside', and you'd get worse temps from the added heatload.

and a note on pelts: to find the heat output of a pelt, you multiply volts times amps. you don't use the qmax.