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What's the word on thermoelectric cooling?

I

imported_shaw

Member
I was looking around on reviews of various water cooling kits and on swiftech's webpage I noticed something called thermoelectric cooling. I personally have never heard of this so I'm supposing that either it's #1 not all that it's cracked up to be or #2 a new untested field.

I'm just curious if anybody else has heard or had any experience with it.
 
Originally posted by: peleejosh
Thermoelectric = TEC = around for a while.
Click to expand...
Oh really? I've actually never heard of it before and I always hear about water cooling and oil cooling, but never TEC. So, how does it perform in CPU cooling versus water and air?
 
way better than water, takes alot more power. You need to insulate or condensation will kill your components. If you know what you're doing, then tec is actually a great way to cool your components, but its a lil too much for me....
 
OMG I can remember these being demo'd at Comdex in the mid 90's.

A TEC is basically a ceramic wafer with wiring running through it. You run a current through it and one side gets hot and the other side gets cold. Simple idea, not so simple to implement. The cold side gets colder than ambient temperature thus causing condensation. You would need to insulate the CPU area as if you were using phase change cooling. Also, the hot side can get really hot and needs something to cool it or it will overheat and kill the TEC unit - after which your CPU wouldn't last too long. Looking at the Swiftech stuff, their TECs are cooled by water. This makes the Swiftech kind of a cheaper version of a phase change cooler, perhaps not quite getting as cold but definately getting below ambient temperature which no water or air cooling can do unaided.

Also as mentioned, TECs eat up power. This power drains off as more heat on the hot side, so it isn't as if it drops 20º on the cold side and goes up 20º on the hot side. It'll drop 20º on the cold side and go up 40º on the hot side. I'm just pulling numbers out of thin air to illustrate the point.
 
Only way to use a TEC in this day and age is to couple it with a watercooling setup. you need high powered ones to cool modern cpus and a good watercooling loop to remove the produced waste heat
 
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