TEC a Waste of Time?

Hi All, I have a P4 3.2e stepping EO, on a IC7G Max III, with 1 Gig of Geil PC4000, and a TruePower 550.The CPU cooling is the now discontinued swiftech 226w air cooled pelt with a Vantec tornado running on a seperate meanwell psu.I'm only able to get to about 3.85ghz stable, though I can boot and play SOME games at 4.0ghz if I bump the voltage up to 1.525 which seems to high for this stepping cpu, oh and the memory is running 1:1 btw.

Now I also own the Swiftech 226w water cooled pelt, a Thermochill 120.3 radiator, MPC650 Pump, and 1/2" id tubing with a t-line.I have the system hooked up and running to leak test and bleed.All is well there.I was planning on having everything outside of the case except of course the TEC/Waterblock

Now as I sit here thinking about ripping out this noisy air pelt and installing the water pelt, I'm wondering if its even worth the hassel or if I'm just wasting my time.Is the water version of this pelt going to be enough for this hot prescott.

water version will be much better than the air cooled one

I was using the Swifty 226W WC pelt on my 3.4 775. MCP-350 pump, BIP2 rad with 2x Evercool aluminum fans. -12 to -14C idle up to about 10C on load. I just swapped a P5AD2-E for a P5WD2 and haven't coated it or made new gaskets, so it's off for the time being. I am contemplating moving to phase change, so I might leave it off for a few weeks and run just WC.

Anyway, it worked well, but my CPU was pretty much at it's limit before the pelt. Max on WC was 4.2. Max on the pelt was 4350. The difference on the pelt was I could run the 4.2 OC with the minimum selectable Vc in BIOS (1.2875) instead of 1.4875

If you have it, I'd toss it in. I don't know what kind of temps you were getting on an air-cooled 226W pelt, but a WC'd pelt has got to be SO much more efficient...and the more heat you can off the pelt, the colder the cold plate will be.

What kind of temps do you see on the air-cooled pelt?