Can A Wish.com Water Block and a $4 Peltier Beat a 360mm Radiator?

[djdjukic]

The Peltier element has a certain cooling capacity, once you put enough heat on its cold side it gets overwhelmed and the heat stays trapped in the water loop.
Off the top of my head, when I was cooling Pentium III CPUs which had a TDP of around 35W, my 60W Peltier (12V 5A) couldn't keep up and I got worse temps than without the TEC. I would say you need to put at least 3x TDP's worth of power into your TEC, or across multiple TECs, in order to get any cooling at all.
So for a ~90W TDP CPU you would need at least 270W worth of TECs. That would be 5 60W elements. You should go for at least 7 or 8 to have some margin, and maybe even to get sub-ambient at low loads.
Is this expensive and outrageously inefficient? Yes. But it should be cool.
EDIT: I should also add - don't stack your Peltiers, keep them at 1 element per tower cooler, and chain the water block+Peltier+tower cooler assemblies in a water loop. Maybe add a radiator without fans into the loop to provide a sort of heat buffer, without a radiator the total thermal mass of the loop is small and you might get large spikes in temperature.

[christophervanzetta]

"...pretty much everything I do on this channel doesn't make sense"
But it sure is interesting entertainment

[MattMastracci]

I love the authenticity and enthusiasm of this channel.

[Seraph.G]

6:05 "Yeah, we're doin' things!" should be the slogan of the channel

[Super]

Could you run a radiator directly out of the cpu, then somewhere later in the loop run a peltier water block?

[MusaM]

Try using a second waterblock with an air cooler on it and compare it to direct air cooling and to a radiator.

[delscoville]

I tried this way back when my AMD K7 was bleeding edge. It cooled the chip well, really well, then melded the fan on the radiator.

[____]

So a 100w peltier will provide ~10w of cooling and 90w of heat. The tec also provides quite a lot of thermal resistance. It would work a lot better to put the water block straight on the air cooler

[bking]

Turn the thing upside down man, convection is a thing.

[Krebzonide]

You got a 12706. That means it will use 6 amps and remove about 50W of heat. If you use a 12715 it will use 15 amps and remove about 130W of heat. A 360mm radiator can easily dissipate 300W-600W of heat as long as you get it hot enough above ambient and have good fans.

[Meoiswa]

Peltiers can move heat using electricity, but they're very bad heat conductors. This means that while yes, they can cool down things by transporting heat away form them, they do it at a very slow speed, therefore they only really work for things that don't generate heat by themselves, like the inside of a cooler, or a can of beverage. You would need a massive surface area covered with dozens (hundreds? thousands?) of Peltiers to cool down the wattage of a CPU!

[PolskiJaszczomb]

Oh hey, I just recently graduated with a thesis based on trying to cool a CPU with Peltier. The result of that is pretty simple:
Unless you have an IHS the size of a Peltier that is capable of moving MORE heat than the CPU produces - you cannot cool the CPU. Heat transfer rate of such Peltier module is way too low, hence it must be stronger than the heat source. And the moment you start pumping say 100W from the CPU you have over 200W of heat to take from the hot side. I've used a 40x40x3.2mm (TEC1-12715) module with Qmax of 144W, at peak efficiency at 13.2V (powered from a PSU that supplied my PC, had to use DC-DC boost converter :D) it I still got a score of 59C under 65W of load, as a reference I've used Liquid Freezer II 360mm, which managed to keep that temperature under 95W. And boy, was the radiator of that LF II warm when it cooled the Peltier under this 13.2V.

The only way of "efficiently" using Peltier module is for a burst stress testing, such as a CPU-Z validation. Also, sides of the Peltier are terribly wavy, you need to spread the paste manually.

[MrBgman]

I had a spare 4770k lying around still in its old mobo with a 850 watt power supply. I had just learned what peltier tacs were that day and instantly got the idea to cool a cpu with that day, went on ebay and grabbed a 450w peltier tac and went to work on stripping couple psu cables when it arrived I slapped a hyper 212 on it and booted it up, idle temps were 4-5c and load temps were just around 30c, but after 10 mins I didnt realize it was condensating and then it got into the socket and short circuited the board and cpu lol. Good times

[brycebraxmeyer]

Try running through a rad to drop the temps to near ambient, then run it through the peltier to reduce temps even more.

[piersonm]

I would love to see one or more of these hooked up in series with a radiator in the same loop

[Hakan.Tolgay]

Peltier can be used as a supporter to the radiator. It can be in series to the radiator before and/or after.

[sevpha]

What about adding the peltier to an existing water loop?
I mean, have the colder return hose to the CPU be connected to a peltier device and see if that super cools the water in addition to a reg loop setup. How much lower could you get in terms of temps with and without the peltier device?

[chrissavill]

I had an all in one, CoolIt peltier setup years ago and that definitely worked. It had 3 peltiers sandwiched between 3 little water blocks (joined together in a loop) on one side, and a round central doughnut like radiator in the middle, on the other side. One end of the radiator doughnut was closed and had a waterpump bolted to the back side, the other open end had a fan sucking air out the back of my case. It used a lot of power but my temps never exceeded 20 degrees celsius.

[NotQuiteAsianOG]

Different peltiers have different heat dissipation. I would opt for a 250w should work just fine

[SuppenDfg]

I would be more interested how the radiator + tec in series would perform. The radiator would cool the water to ambient temperature and the tec could bring it below that. Additionally you could cool the hot side of the tec with your evaporative cooler.