I've been looking at getting into peltier cooling lately. I already have my water cooling setup and I would just have to get a peltier, coldplate and some insulation.

Can anybody share some of their experiences with peltier cooling and what equipment they used.

I copied and pasted from an earlier reply I made:

Quote: Worse than the power draw is the condensation problem. When the hot side is properly cooled, the cold side gets absolutely FRIGID. Ice will form around, and even worse, below the CPU. What I did was fill the center of the CPU socket with silicone, sealed the edge of the socket with silicone, used electronic grease for the pin holes, and got a 2 inch tall closed foam block to fit around the outside of the CPU and heatsink. I also used a special gel on the bottom edges of the heatsink that prevents condensation. You will also need a shim and spacer for your cpu.

Did it cool? Yup. Did it live up to my expectations? Nope. The mistake I made was getting a 185W Pelt instead of a lower voltage one. At the time I was air cooling and I couldn't dissipate the heat efficiently enough to allow the cold side to really work. Now that I'm on water, I have been playing with the idea of doing it again. More than likely though I will use lcpiper's idea and put the pelt in my water line.

Yea, and you gota figure out how your going to power that sucker too.

First, let me say I am not trying to turn you away, I just want you to know what your doing and know what to expect.

Lets look at it from the requirement point of view;

I will make an assumption and you can adjust from there.
Let's say you have an XP and your going to be putting out 120watts on the high end.

Then your going to need about 30-50% overage on the peltier rating, so you need a 150watt or better.

For power you will need (V x Amps = watts) 12V X 12.5amps = 150watts. That is alot of amperage out of an ATX style PSU.

Or you can look for a dedicated PSU.

Peltiers have a Vmax rating which is the maximum voltage they can handle, most are 16V or more. There is also a Max amperage (current) rating and you can't exceed this without damaging it. If you got a 13.5V PSU then you would only need 11.1 Amps to Max your Peltier. Try and find an ATX PSU that supplies even 11 Amps on the 12V rail.
Of course you don't need to max it, but you should be getting close because of your thermal load.

Now that you know about powering a peltier, you need to know that you have to cool the thermal load of the CPU and the Peltier both. That is why Peltier cooling todays processors pretty much requires water cooling, your going to have a thermal load equivelant to 270watts of juice. Oww! that's HOT. And that heat source is inside your comp. Better set that radiator up to exhaust out of the case.

Then you have to deal with condensation in the short term, and rust in the long term.

Last, you might think that if your peltier failed you would still have your water block there to save you. But the material a peltier is made of will actually insulate and inhibit heat transfer if the peltier looses power or fails.

That is why I looked for alternatives to Direct Peltier cooling, my water chiller is a very good one because you effect the cooling performance indirectly through chilling the water and it can sit outside the case so the extra heat is outside, and if it fails your still running water cooling as normal, you just loose the extra cooling. In fact, you can turn it on and off as you need with no harm or problems.

That is part of the reason my replacement PSU is an Antec TruePower 430 pushing 20A of the 12V rail. Lot's o' clean juice.

nooooo not peilters. it matters the quality of the chip cheap ones wont do jack (can i say ****?) but i saw some good $50 chips a while back a a parts store that was keeping a block of ice frozen. the ice was formed from pouring water on it. very nice. but the peilter in say the mini fridge it dont put out. shop around. thick ceramic slab usually means more layers of junctions = colder keeping abilities. make it pimp

Wow... I can't believe I missed this thread until now...
I was just about to ask the same question as Skew!

I'm not liking the downsides enough to go for it... I think I'll just try insulating my resevoir and seeing how that works for now.

Piper and Akita, thanks! That helped a helluva lot!

Remember Darksam, we were talking mostly about "Direct Peltier cooling" of a selected component. I liked my peltier powered water chiller alot.

Tell you what, I am off today, I will knock out a quick article today that will touch on it, should be up later on. But the specifics are short in this case.

I built my chiller using a plexi toped water block, the stresses were too great on the plexi and I broke two of them, use a swifty MCW462U, they run about $47.00 +.

Funny thing about peltiers is that their wattage rating is partly determined by their power rating and partly by their surface area. A peltier is a heat pump device and their surface area plays a big part in there ability to transfer heat. So when you buy a peltier look at the dimensions and make sure the base of all the surfaces are as big or bigger then the peltier or you will loose some of the rated potential of the peltier.

Using the peltier in a chiller that is outside the case means that the additional heat and possible condensation are also outside the case. This also can make your life easier.

When you line up the components of a water cooling system, start with your pump and go to the component that you want to cool that produces the least amount of heat first, then to the next hotest, and so-forth. After you get to the hotest component being cooled, go straight to the radiator to get that heat out of your system, radiators should always exhaust, the water is warm and the air coming off of it will be warm, keep it out, not in.
Trust me on this issue, the dynamics are like this;
The greater the difference (or Delta) between the hot component and the water, the better your heat transfer and the warmer your water will get. If you start with the hotest component then the water will already be too warm to adequately cool other components that produce less heat, (you could even heat them). Start coolest, the water will still be cooler and the componet will be fine, and your water temp won't increase much. Get the next hotest part, same thing, you will cool it, the water won't increase in temp much. By the time you get to the CPU (usually the hotest part), your water temp will not have increased much at all and you will still get excellent cooling on the CPU. If you do things the other way, you will heat the water enough with the CPU that the GPU, chipset, etc, will all suffer and limit your cooling efforts.

Hip-pocket article 101.