Anyone still use peltiers?

Charles Kozierok

Elite Member
May 14, 2012
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These were becoming "hip" in the late 1990s before I dropped off the PC radar for a number of years. Never hear about them any more.

Assume they've been replaced by heat pipe heatsinks and/or water cooling at this point? Or does anyone still use them?
 

ShintaiDK

Lifer
Apr 22, 2012
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I havent seen them either since then.

It also sounds very dangerous to have a relative powerful electric device on top of a CPU with a copper IHS.
 

xylem

Senior member
Jan 18, 2001
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I don't think they are used very much any more, since the heat output of top modern processors is too high for their use to be practical. They would work fine in conjunction with other types of cooling (heat pipe, water), but the power use of a peltier which is actually capable of transferring that much heat energy would be prohibitive.
 

ChronoReverse

Platinum Member
Mar 4, 2004
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They generate heat too so you'd need something really hefty on the other side to draw all the heat off.
 

Charles Kozierok

Elite Member
May 14, 2012
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Yeah, they only seem useful in special situations these days. They can cool below ambient temperature, but they produce heat themselves, and all of it has to be removed somehow.
 

BrightCandle

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Mar 15, 2007
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Peltiers use 1W to remove 1W of heat, so they double the amount of power to cool. If you don't remove the heat they start resisting the heat transfer becoming an insulator and baking the CPU to an early demise.

Small peltiers that fit between a water block and a CPU don't come in 125W+, so you don't see them on modern processors. If we got back to 40-50W while overclocked then they become viable again and all the benefits of being sub zero come with it, but modern processors just output too much heat to use them which is why you don't see them much anymore.
 

Idontcare

Elite Member
Oct 10, 1999
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Sub-ambient cooling in general took a nose-dive right around 2006-2007, be it peltier or vapor-phase or dry-ice, etc. Water nearly died at the same time but it hung on for another 3-4 yrs before hitting an adoption-rate brick wall (not talking about the corsair-type pedestrian water cooling).

Basically once heat-pipe enabled air-cooling came along, combined with PWM 120mm and 140mm fans being routine and mobo fan headers that ramped rpms (noise) with CPU temperature, the market for non-air cooling lost its cost-benefits edge.

Consider that circa 2009 I removed and mothballed my already purchased vapor-phase cooling hardware (cost me $1k) and installed a Tuniq120 while taking a 700MHz clockspeed hit (4GHz -> 3.3GHz) and I didn't mind it all. I mean I already owned this $1k peice of hardware and I was not willing to bother using it anymore, the ice, the condensation, the mess, the issues...just wasn't worth it.

(not too mention the condensation issues were what killed my $1500 QX6700, but that wasn't the reason I mothballed the unit)

When I look at the market now, what I can get with air-cooling versus water versus anything else, there is almost no opportunity left on the table for water cooling let alone sub-ambient cooling. The glory days are gone.
 

Charles Kozierok

Elite Member
May 14, 2012
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Thanks for the responses.

Basically once heat-pipe enabled air-cooling came along...

Assume you are referring to those large tower coolers with fans on either side.

Are they really more effective than water cooling? That's interesting. I guess then water cooling has the advantage of not needing to mount a monstrosity on your motherboard? :)

I don't have a lot of personal experience with this because I'm not an overclocker and am fine with the stock cooler.
 

Rubycon

Madame President
Aug 10, 2005
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We actually call them TE coolers or TECs. ;)
Yes they are still used but not as you may think.
TE coolers are used in applications where critical temperature control (spot cooling) is needed where other solutions are not practical. DPSS lasers are stabilized with the help of TECs and this is one application where a TEC is used to both draw heat from an element and pump heat into another part.

It was popular in the Pentium III era with sub 30W loads. Sub ambient cooling is possible but without safeguards in place to prevent condensation it can make the adventure relatively short lived.

Water cooling has merit in higher density computing applications. Self contained, turnkey systems seem to be gaining popularity as well. They provide cooling capacity that rival and in some cases exceed the high end tower heat pipe coolers. The problem with these leviathan coolers is if the system is physically moved often or subject to sudden, unexpected movement damage to the system board is likely. Water blocks don't have this problem. Other areas of the system (voltage regulator modules, chipsets, etc.) can also have better thermal management with a full cover block. GPUs will run much cooler as well.

With today's chips pushing well over 200W under heavy load and overvolted/overclocked it would take a large TEC that would need to remove 400+W heat! The largest tower coolers are "saturated" at the 250W point so this would have disastrous consequences. A water block can remove this kind of heat however it has to go somewhere. A 120.3 radiator will barely cover this. That's something for another discussion altogether - how many shady manufacturers over rate their product's specification!