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First time TEC woes

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torin3

Member
Joined
Dec 25, 2004
I figured I would post my experience here. I've been watercooling for about a year now, mostly with decent stuff (DD Maze4, Via 1300), but I left on the radiator from my 2 week trial with an Aahnix Iceberg II kit. I didn't think it was too bad of a decision. I was getting about 36-37°C idle and about 42-44°C under load.

Well I decided it was about time to build a whole new system designed for o/cing. So I got a peltier and power supply and decided to test it out on this system first.

Didn't start out TOO bad. Got down to about -12°C in the first 10 minutes of testing it in open air with the pump running but no fans on the radiator. Then it started to warm back up as the water got a bit too hot for best performance (the coldplate was at about -3°C) when I shut it off.

Well, there was some confusion about the order of the neoprene kit from DD, but I did manage to get it figured out. However, since I wanted to get a nice seal to the motherboard, I decided to use the nuts on the mounting allthread over the first layer of the neoprene. I though I got them below the surface of the socket. Turns out I didn't. One fried Athlon XP 2400+ chip.

Figured out what happened, and popped in my backup 1600 chip. Fired it up with the peltier and MBM5 and watched the temps. Over the course of an hour it goes from 24°C to 62°C and still rising when I shut it off.

Oh well, yank the peltier and order a new radiator. Oh, while removing the peltier I see that it is cracked all around the edges on one side. Send it back to DD too.

So, around Friday I should be getting the heater core that DD sells (2x120), shroud, 2 2x120 fans and a replacement peltier.

I'll try again then :-/
 
Just take your time and follow thier directions. It may not seem so "hardcore" to follow the directions, but they do work if followed correctly.
 
sandman001 said:
Just take your time and follow thier directions.

Which directions would those be? The only instructions on DD site for peltiers is a link to general articles on condensation prevention at OCtools, (which I read), and no instructions were sent with the neoprene kit.

I apologize if my post gave the impression that I just slapped it together, but I am the type of person who will sit down with the instructions next to me and keep referring to them as I install something. Heck, it took me about a day of tracking down all the install guides I could find online to find one that gave me a recommended cure time for the conformal coating (24 hrs), which I followed, even though it seemed hard after only a few hours.
 
Now that you mention it, I did the slip of paper with their website on it at well when I bought my Maze4-1 a year ago too. My main problem was the fact that I had a nut that visually looked ok, but was actually about .005-.010" too high, which blocked the coldplate from seating properly. As to why the peltier cracked, I'm not sure. I was careful to use alternating screw tightening, and only going about 1/4 turn at most when snuging it up. It may have been cracked before, because the cracks are only visible when they have a little bit of artic silver stuck in them.
 
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