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Everything Is Cooler With A Peltier 77

Posted by timothy from the devil-will-find-work-for-idle-hands-to-do dept.
Morph1uz writes: "Starving for some information about Celerons, I was whisked away to the land of people drunk from the power that computers hold on them, only to find one special article on overclockin.com: a dual Alpha Fan and Peltier ON A COCA-COLA CAN! An avid fan of Coke, I decided I need to build one ..." Nutty. Guess it's just one of those things that you have to do, and document photographically.
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Everything Is Cooler With A Peltier More

Everything Is Cooler With A Peltier

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  • Re:Peltiers generate a heat difference (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    They are pretty inefficient and generate a large amount of "extra" heat while running. Where do you think all that electricty is going?

  • cooler (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    peltiers *generate* heat, so you'd better have good case cooling as well as it for cpu cooling.

  • Re:cooler (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    One side gets hot, the other side gets cold, but not by as much, so therefore, technically they do generate heat. OK?
  • Whadda ya bet the same person who moderated this up as "Interesting" is the one who moderated the original down as "Off-topic" and is the one who moderated a later version of it (post # 13) down as "Redundant"?
  • You can cool a canful quickly by laying it on its side in a dish of crushed ice and spinning it. This keeps the cooled liquid from hanging around the cool surface and blocking warmer fluid from coming in direct contact with the cold aluminum.

    Roughly five years ago, somebody in Iowa patented an ice-cooled motorized horizontal can rotator that brings a beer or coke down to drinking temp. in the time of a couple TV commercials.

    The guy's peltier cooler would work better if he 1) better insulated the can from the ambient air (locally heated by the output side of the Peltier junction), and 2) contrived to circulate the fluid somehow.

    The one thing I don't get is, what's the Alpha for?

  • i am sick of the bias on slashdot that seems to be implying that only thinks Pepsi matters. Pepsi is NOT the only thing that needs compatibility.

    As an ardent user of RC Cola, i'm annoyed. Pepsi generally gets drivers for everything, so why are you complaining? RC Cola hardware drivers, meanwhile, are almost impossible to get done. Meaning we have to run the Pepsi Emulation Layer, or just not use that hardware.

    This wouldn't be so bad if we could easily simply adapt the pepsi drivers for rc cola, but no, then we have liscensing issues to worry about. blah. It is not easy to be drinking a soda which has a smaller user base and a liscence incompatible with both closed-source products and its fellow open-source source-compatible sodas. I realize most Slashdot readers are Pepsi users, but please try to be a little more considerate and inclusinve when asking for hardware support, and remember Pepsi is not the only alternative soda out there.
  • I want to know if it will work on Mountain Dew. Can I run it from my car battery?
  • Didn't that make the Coke go flat?

    Not that I recall. Why would it? The can was still sealed.

  • Riight.. dipping Cesium in a water-based substance like cola is just ingenius. (-:

    "Make your soda POP"
  • Does anyone know of any totally passive cooling systems? Maybe a convective cooling system, f.ex, which heats up some freon-substitue and carries the head up to the top of the case where there is a bin fin-encrusted cooling area?

    I've decided that silence is really key if I'm going to be able to run my server 24/7/365. (or is that 24/7/52 ?)

    Johan
  • And of course, the obvious, use your old Amiga 500 as a door wedge

    Everyone knows you're supposed to use the docking stations from your old laptops as door wedges.
  • Thats the reason why you should coat your processor and the surrounding area with a thin layer of silicon. HLT and CPUIdle are good utilities for keeping the CPU cool. You may not be overclocking, but to an overclocker, every degree makes counts.
  • Swiftech has a new SE (side exhaust) fan system that draws air perpendicular to the heat sink. Supposedly it uses the Venturi effect to cool the heat sink down further. It also leads air directly into the path of the rear exhaust fan. Unfortunately, it also looks bulky enough to block certain important components on a less than ample mobo (such as a microATX).
  • 1- Dominate the Cola Market
    2- Dominate the Cooling Market for PC's
    3- Brainwash world population
    4- Take ove...er...enlighten the world

    Seriously though, this was a pretty cool idea (pardon the pun), next time the might wanna try using something a little more effective then coke. The can was a good idea because the aluminum conducts heat very well.
    If they could find a copper tube about the same size as the coke bottle, fill it with water, and seal it up tight. Then you might be able to get it down to about 30F or so.
    But thier are tons of other liquids that would cool better.

    Most people might have better luck with a water cooling solution based on the Kryotech design. Tons of them around.
    Try here: http://www.agaweb.com/coolcpu [agaweb.com]
    One of my fav old sites.
  • 486's aren't clock-locked like new Pentiums. Change the multiplier (II have an old Compaq 486 DX/4 100 that I oc'd to 133 by 4*33)
  • Isn't this just the sort of thing we need to know about guys? Although I have to say, I think knowing how cool it got the drink would be useful... (Did it freeze it? Was it cooler than from the fridge? Did it prove to be a wasted effort)

    Kind of demonstrates how versatile all this computer hardware we use is. Let's see, if we can cool cans with processor fans, what's next? The obvious answer is of course that we can use the processors that the fans had previously been on to fry up a cooked breakfast (and then to give us an excuse to test out the nearest fire extinguisher).

    Maybe there are other uses, a new line in geek magicians perhaps? (Pick a sound card, any sound card.... ....was that your sound card?)

    And of course, the obvious, use your old Amiga 500 as a door wedge *:)

    --
  • By the time your processor dies (you probably have discarded it long before it dies), you will probably be able to buy a 6000 MHz processor for $200
    No, I won't be discarding processors willy nilly. I plan to keep the processor running for 10 years plus. Frankly, I'd rather reserve my money for increased I/O performance e.g DDRAM and multiple SCSI HDs than for a faster processor. A 1GHz processor wouldn't be as useful to me as 4* 600MHz processors, besides being much more expensive. Even better would be processors based on the ARM, Alpha, G4 and generally RISC CPUs, but for cost.
  • I'm trying to create a server on a PC budget. I don't want to change processors within 5 years.

    With the 22 million odd transistors on the K7 comes an increase in heat. The situation will improve with the introduction of copper (more conductive) interconnects replacing the currently used aluminium ones.

    I don't regard the MC2001 as a waste of money as I can modify it for use with future processors.

  • I've seen worse sites, but this is pretty bad design. See this comment [slashdot.org] for book recommendations.

    The site tries to set some illegal cookies upon clicking one of his links and crashing my luvverly browser -> Opera 4.0 Beta 2

  • Point taken. However I'm not planning to change the software running on my machine, even if I do upgrade Linux, Oracle, AOLServer, I'll downgrade if the hardware is not sufficient.

    In a few years no doubt, I'll be running a photonic computer with fibre links and additional blahblah. But, I'll still be running this machine or be sharing it with some Developing country. Donate your unneeded machines to these people. Better still go there and do some teaching/sysadmin/coding as well.

  • Not to mention, peltier devices draw another 65 watts of energy and a computer system that is loaded to every expansion slot and bay with devices will most likely not have enough power for the Peltier.
    Swiftech recommend that you use a separate PS for the Peltier. However you have to remember to turn off the Peltier when you switch off the PC or you end up with ice in your machine. Perhaps you could offer a timeshare in fridges ;-).

    I agree wholeheartedly on your main point regarding overclocking. Diehard gamers and those with too much money (why don't you donate some to a worthwhile charity?) like to increase their framerates. It is quite virtually a matter of life and death to them. THey tend to forget about I/O!. See my previous comment [slashdot.org] for why I'm considering a Peltier.

  • I would think that it's fairly self evident that, when using a Peltier, you should not let the fans exhaust into the case. Using a good server/workstation case with lots of space for ventilation, such as the Addtronics WT8500 or the SUPER MICRO SC-750A, is advisable.

    Peltiers do generate a lot of heat but, for example, the Swiftech MC2001 uses 2 fans for two thermoelectric coolers (the Peltier junctions), moving 66 cfm of air. Do you think Peltier manufacturers are so grossly incompetent as to heat up the insides of the case? Freezing, that's a different matter. They recommend that you use a silicon compound [swiftnets.com] to prevents moisture penetrating the circuits and then freezing solid..

    Anandtech, amongst others, has written a review [anandtech.com] of Swiftech's MC2000 and MC1000 Peltiers.

    I am not, nor have been connected with Swiftech in any way.

  • I have two comments. Remember when we believed that processors that required external cooling were flawed designs?

    Also, my peltier destroyed two processors. How you might ask? Well when the underside of the CPU was cooler than the air around it, condensation formed on it and ppfffffffffttttt***!
  • I guess you answered my question. Congratulations, sir: you and I have wasted useful bandwidth having a little slagging match.

    I just have two questions: whose tongue were you talking about? Surely that should have read "your tongue"?
    And what in the name of all that's smelly and obnoxious is a goatface?

    (All done now btw. Go back to your tinker-toys.)



  • and don't try emptying it on the floor

    "Some Coke?"
    "Yeah, sure, but just a small slice"



  • The only time I've ever seen a CPU overheat (and I'm a K6 user too) was the time my cpu fan went out. I use a better-than-the-cheapie type of fan, ones that cost in the $20-$30 range, and I run the machine 24/7.

    I'll agree with you that you're best off buying the best you can afford when it comes to most parts, but you can get about eight of these fan/heatsinks for the price of one MC2001. Buy two of these, and that way if you see one going out, just shut down, pop one off, pop the other one on, and you're back in business.

    Besides, according to IRS rules, 5 years is the depreciation time of most PC's/Servers. In the real world, we know that if you get 5 years out of a machine (be it used for a PC, Server, or whatever) you've gotten your money's worth many times over.
  • My socket7 motherboard had merely a heat sink, but it didn't have screws. So I got a CPU fan and put it on sideways. This allows the center of the chip (the place where it gets hottest) to be cooled.

    Then, one of the arms of the fan came off so I used oscillating fan from ma kitchen... =)


    .sig:
  • Actually, you might want to check these guys [totl.net] out. Scary...
  • The newest set of iMacs are entirely convection cooled. No freon or anything, just cleverly placed vents, and a processor heatsink about half the size of what you'll see on a pentium(I/II/ III). Basically the only heat they produce is from the built-in monitor.

    Also, all other G3 (and as far as I know G4) Macs have no processor fan, just a single case fan. If I open my blue & white G3 after it's been on for a few days non-stop, the heatsink is about as warm as my hands. The Motorola/IBM PPC has been a copper chip for a number of years now (since the 604 I think), so it hardly puts out any heat at all.

    LinuxPPC or netBSD are both options for Apple hardware servers, as is of course Mac OS X Server, if you want to spend money.

  • They are also used on civil aircraft FLIRs (Forward Looking Infra Red) Like Police helicopters and the like. This is mainly due to the fact that you don't have to worry about the large costs of cryo-cooling. They are used for short periods of time (cost/benefit payoff). The heat generated is thrown away into the atmosphere.

    Liam.
    --
  • If you had read the article, you would have seen that the can did NOT freeze. Not even close. The coldest recorded temp was 42 degrees, a less than amazing 10 degrees above the freezing point of water (and coke freezes at an even lower temp due to the impurities. And that was after it sat all night long. Sludge is unimpressed.
  • I am considering a Swiftech MC2001.

    That part claims to draw 2x6 amps of 12vdc. Your basic 200W power supply offers 7 amps of 12 volt to run your HD, CD, it's own fan &c. I'm guessing you need at least 400 W ps to get the 12 amps of peltier + 1 A HD + 0.6 A CD + 0.5 A misc. Those start around $150.

    Don't buy the hype. You don't need a $370 system to cool your $175 processor.

  • why don't we just use our computers in the snow?
  • The site doesn't say whether this is Pepsi compatable or not.

    Who cares about Pepsi. It needs to work with Jolt!
    ---

  • Oh, okay... when you said "followed by the can of coke," I thought you meant the contents of the can, not the can itself :)
  • Didn't that make the Coke go flat?

  • Peltier devices *do* generate heat. All electrical devices that do useful work do likewise. There is no doubt a measureable voltage drop accross the device. This, multiplied by the current through the device, represents the power used by the device. That power, integrated over time, represents the energy lost by the device, and ultimately that energy is dissipated as heat. This is the basic problem of "Can you cool the whole room by leaving the refrigerator door open?". The answer is NO. It's a basic law of thermodynamics.

    However, with the right kind of case, he can produce local cold spots inside the case. The room as a whole, however, will get hotter.

    The idea that a refrigerator is really a net heater with respect to the room it occupies is counter-intuitive, but true.

  • Okay, so its probably stupid to buy a CPU and run it at a much higher speed than you should.

    But if you already have a CPU and want to upgrade then the worst case is that you break your existing chip, and have to pay for the new CPU that you were going to buy anyway, whereas the best case is that it works perfectly, saving the entire cost of a new CPU.
  • if you have a case with plenty of ventilation, as well as good fans on the peltiers, they will add to the life of the CPU. That said, I've never seen a cpu that was burnt out from normal usage or electron migration, but have seen hundreds of failed harddrives and a handful of shot ram. i would consider a peltier a good idea when attempting to cool the cpu in an attempt to overclock it, but maybe a little overkill if it's just to increase life of a normally operating chip. but heh, peltiers do have a serious coolness factor.

    think of a peltier cooling a chip and then a watercooling system cooling the hot side of the peltier, that my friend is pretty high on the cool scale :)

    go with a peltier, and use it as the excuse to overclock a teensy bit :)
  • I have heard of reports of frost and ice on the cpu. I have even heard of someone who ran a peltier on his pentium 200MHz CPU/system, utilizing an UPS, for four years while he was at college. He claimed that the BIOS' APM feature shut-down parts of the CPU, tremendously reducing the CPU's operations and heat output, thus allowing the peltier to super-freeze it. There is something wrong with such claims. The mission of the Peltier TEC is to actually transfer heat from the CPU to the heatsink with 99.99999% efficiency. The Peltier TEC is supposed to cool down the CPU to an ambient temperature, where it is slightly above freezing temperature. In other words, it simply moves the heat from the CPU to the heatsink! It can't get ambient without transfering the heat. Without heat on the CPU, it does nothing! How does ice or frost get on the CPU when it is not designed to meet the freezing temperature? Am I wrong about this? I have been reading the docs on Peltiers and without pictures of ice on the CPUs, I can only talk about the Peltier TEC's specifications and whatnot; what they say on their website.<p>
  • Grarg,<p>

    We are both falling into these cowards's traps. I
    used to do what you did and noticed that by
    replying to their offtopic flames with our offtopic comments, we are fullfilling one of their goals... spam slashdot because it is a threat to them as a newsgroup for information, a logic center, and a great atmosphere for developers. Generally, a sanctuarry to people that enjoy the private sector and other good powers. We can't win until we get his IP and ping him off. Now, back to those Peltier TECs...<p>

    I hear that they bring you down to ambient temperature. Will it be safe if I put one on my neck while I am out fishing for yellowtail behind Catalina island? Ofcourse, on a hot day? Will it cool me down? I saw something on TV that looked like a plate of steal that you put on your neck. On contact, it cooled you down. Like the moment of a chill down your spine as someone put an icecube down your back. Ah, the many ideas for cooling devices! Forget cooling the CPUs! I am going to epoxy 10 of them on my chest and back! Ya!<p>
  • First of all, overclocking a CPU past its rated cycle rate is no less than a risk of reducing the life and workability of the CPU. For example, I have a 486 100MHz system. I sure would be able to run my daemons faster if I had a faster CPU, but I won't overclock it. I will not overclock it to 133MHz or 150MHz. If I need a faster CPU, then I'll buy a faster CPU, put it into a system that it is rated for, and then split the tasks efficiently between them. When people think that it is worthwhile to overclock their CPU(s), they may actually be burrying themselves with more costs. For example, Johny buys a 333MHz Cellery CPU($60), a good peltier TEC cooling kit($50), and a verrry large heatsink and fan to sandwitch the peltier TEC($40). With all this, Johny thinks that he can reliably run his Cellery CPU at 550MHz. It does and he thinks it is sweet! When it comes time to upgrade, there is a physical barrier between the latest Pentium cartridged CPUs and he can't use his peltier-affect device on the latest CPUs. He wants to buy a 600MHz Pentium III and overclock it to 800MHz. Duh! Everyone has an urge for running earlier model objects as the later models. Aren't there hundreds of books on such issues? Poor Man's this and Poor Man's that. Maybe everyone should abandon the idea of running their old CPUs higher than their rating. Find another use, sell, or donate their slower devices and buy faster devices. Not to mention, peltier devices draw another 65 watts of energy and a computer system that is loaded to every expansion slot and bay with devices will most likely not have enough power for the Peltier. What is the average power supply? Is it 250 watts? How does software run on an overclocked CPU? An overclocked CPU is more of a risk in a Unix OS than MS Windoze. Unlike MS Windoze, Unix operating systems are more volatile in timing issues. I run Linux and I know better. I see only one reason to use a peltier device. Let me explain that heat is the absolute enemy of CPUs. If a short circuit doesn't break a CPU over the years then the heat will! If you put a peltier on your CPU and do not overclock it, then you will see a small speed increase and the life of the CPU will be tremendously increased. Imagine that if you have overclocked your CPU and your peltier device failed. NOT GOOD! Kiss your burning CPU goodbye!
  • You are a pioneer! An experimenter! I am NRAdude! I will call you HomebreCPUdude! Doesn't intel void the 1 year warranty on the CPU if you do not run it at the rated voltage and cycles of 300MHz and, I think, 100MHz bus? Intel designs an industry standard CPU. They ballanced the Integer processing and FPU verry well, unlike AMD. If you have a task that requires you to run your Pentium II 300MHz CPU at 450MHz, then wouldn't it be better to pay the 35% extra cost, above the cost of your original cpu, for a 450MHz Pentium II CPU? I just want to emphasize reliablility. If it is stable, then have fun with it! My Dual Pentium Pro 200MHz system is just fine for me. When I needed more power on my system, I knew that I had the bandwidth. I just needed more RAM and higher quality storage devices! Soon, with the use of solid-state storage devices, CPU speed may be less critical in performance when you have almost no delay in data transmission across the bus to other devices. My approach for increasing speed was to upgrade from 128MB of Buffered EDO ECC DRAM to 512MB of Buffered EDO ECC DRAM. That is all that I wish to comment on, performance-wise.<p> Your negative remarks on my userID simply shows your ignorance. I have respect for slashdot and now that I know of how it operates, and know of their problem with "trolls", I no longer post offtopic information on, for example, Johny Cash lyrics in the Sega Dreamcast area. Go figure? I just improve on myself. If you think that I am a "gun psycho", then I should have good aim. Do you spy on me? Are you afraid of my accuracy on both the hunting grounds and on slashdot? I defend my first and second ammendment verry well without you. I bargain apples to oranges that you are posting in Lesser Britain or some other country that perverts my freedoms. Do you have a first and second ammendment? Do you now see what happens when you post offtopic stuff? Now, I have gone offtopic. Shame on me. I must rediscipline myself.<p>
  • Oh absolutely! I only mean to reason with people who overclock CPUs above 2x their CPU's clock multiplier! With the ammount of $$$ they spend on the enhancements, they can add more RAM that will give more mid-ranged performance on data storage. You, on the other hand, have overclocked your CPU kinda like how I did. I think that if you can overclock a CPU without causing the addition of anything special(the Peltier TEC), then by all means, take advantage of that small increase! I am sure that it will baffle the BogoMIPS report...:o) Right now, I am running an Intel Pentium 150MHz core/60MHz bus CPU at 166MHz core/66MHz bus. I shouldn't, though. I must keep this system running as a reliable diald route, file server, printer server, accounting data backup agent(yipee to BRU!), and as a typical wordprocessing workstation for my mom at her business. I don't want to do anything to jeapordize her computer system. She paid me a little bit of $$$ for integrating the custom Linux server with two other Windoze95 boxes that I also customized for her. It is just the environment. When I tried overclocking a Pentium 166MHz MMX CPU to a 200MHz MMX CPU and install Linux, I got alota errors and the system bus was not in sync with the ISA bus(8MHz, I think). Keyboard acted a little funny too. Then again, did you know that all CPUs leave a unique oscillation signature? I also suppose that not all CPUs can rate like others. The rating system on CPUs is more of a scientific prediction of the cycles that the CPU will reliably operate at under a certain environment temperature and humidity level. Nothing is exact, really. You are one of the successfull people! Good skill! You know how to pick them!<p>
  • You seriously believe that you'll want to run the same hardware in ten years? Maybe five, but ten? Look at it this way: In ten years a computer with the same capabilities as the one you've got now will probably be available for $25 at someone's garage sale.

    Unless you have some sort of really bizarre internal app that you need to keep static over the years (like if you plan to set the thing up as a controller for a security system or some such thing), keeping that old of a machine around really isn't worth the trouble.

    And as for donating the thing, better to spend the money on another computer than to spend it trying to prolong the life of your current machine. Really

    zs
  • Best way of cooling your machine is throwing it
    in fluid helium !

    Question is: will the mainboard break into pieces
    due to the extreme cold ?

  • Cool a Cola-can? Why not drop it in a bucket of liquid N ? (well...i admit, there is going to be some trouble taking the can out of the bucket...and don't try emptying it on the floor)

    Cool a cpu? Why not use very cold air to keep it down? On the other hand, it is not the CPU that needs speed improvements, for fucks sake! that monster already goes at 600MHz!!! manufacturers should try and increase the speed of the bus to at least 1/2 cpu speed, so the poor thing don't have to wait :( i can think of many others, but i want to keep this post little, so i just think that RAM bus should be at cpu speed too.

    This page dies wednesday :((( [users.hol.gr]

    p.s.:Taco:dissallow "Anonymous Coward" posts. i know freedom of speech is good, but these guys get on our nerves.

    hey look! i got a sig! ain't it massively cool?!?

  • I am about to purchase a Peltier to cool my K7 600. I'm not even going to overclock the processor! I'm trying to prolong the life of my processor (electron migration and all that jazz). etc. etc. $219 etc.

    Migration shmigration. I've overclocked every CPU I've ever owned with no problems. And what's the worst that can happen? You blow a CPU after a year? You'll be able to buy a better CPU than a K7600 for $219 in March 2001, bubbi.

    You should know also that Peltiers, while keeping your CPU nice and chilly, can/will heat up your case quite a bit. If you go this route you'll have to invest in a case fan if you don't have one already, to protect the other heat-sensitive components (video card, NIC, hard drives, everything else).

    Also, attaching a Peltier is one of the few things I see done stupidly by many geeks. In most cases we are bright enough to leap into the fray and get things right, or right-ish, the first time. If you mess up attaching a Peltier, you can get condensation in the wrong places, and then you'll be taking that gold card out of your wallet again.

    Summary: put $219 back in wallet. Go buy lots of beer and have a LAN party. Of course, if you're running some critical database server or something, all this goes out the window. But I'd still go with better fans before a Peltier, even though the Peltier is FAR more Reeeet.

  • However, I read in EE Times (I think it was) about a new breakthrough in Peltier technology: by doping the module with a little Cesium, they got the open circuit temperature drop to 200 degrees C. Still won't move any more heat, but it'll move it over a larger temperature difference.

    Is this a troll from alt.cesium? Will it make great julienne fries and give me thin thighs, as well?

    (Contemplates putting cesium in Coke...)

  • But when thermo-couples die...both sides become hot :) You have less than 5 seconds to rip it off your beer or your cpu as the case may be :) -mwhahaha
  • That project is ridiculous. Ice cubes please!!!!!!!
  • I've seen those before ....very loud...though they are first rate coolers. The PC-10 is another option. A company named PelTEC www.peltec.f2s.com looks like it has stuff going but no pictures yet...but the prices are much better than swiftnets. The Alpha Subzero works on the P3 and the K7...but bare?? I wanna see that. members.tripod.com/peltiers is Tom Leufkens site....he makes stuff from his own sinks (kinda iffy)...

  • What fun! (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The general putting stuff together was probably enjoyable, but watching a can get cold!? maybe they should have made a paint dryer instead.
  • JamesSharman wrote:

    Read this article I remembered a piece of email I received a week or two ago, these [bullnet.co.uk] people do 25watt peltier units for £25uk or 4 for £89uk, 100 watts of cooling power on a coke or pepsi (lets not be colaist) is probably sufficient.

    This was two 50 watt peltier units (i.e. 100 watts). It was sufficient to cool it to just about typical refrigerator temperature, but not to freeze it. It looks like the site you reference is selling 51 watt peltier units for £25uk, not 25 watt.

    Also, now you're talking European soda cans, which are a bit narrower and would require tooling new cold plates for the right radius. ;-)

    ----
  • Don't worry about electromigration and all the other buzzwords you hear thrown around. I have 486s and early Pentium machines that run so hot you could fry eggs on them. Most of them have passive, fanless heatsinks. Some of them have no heatsink at all. All of them have been running for *years*. Spend the $219 on a bigger hard drive, more RAM, and/or a really good passive heatsink like the Alpha (the company, not the CPU.)

    I see no reason to spend more on a heat sink than you did on a CPU (going by pricewatch anyway.)

    - A.P.
    --


    "One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad

  • Now that's a case of reefer madness...

    --


  • A much better use of over clocking tech-no-olagy would be to crank an old 486 up from 33 to ooh about 256 and use it to keep my coffee warm.

  • For those interested in the science behind this, Ars Technica [arstechnica.com] is running a good piece on Peltier cooling, including a summary of how they work [arstechnica.com].
    --
  • While I was working in a pathology lab several years back I had access to liquid nitrogen. I had figured out the exact amount of LN2 necessary to cool a can of coke from room temperature to an appropriate temperature for drinking. It was about a cup or so. I'd just put the LN2 in the dewer, followed by the can of coke. A minute later (after the LN2 had boiled away), the coke was ready to drink.
  • I recently finished a fridge I made out of a styrofoam ice chest and a peltier device. It works pretty good. I have a picture here [home.com]. I use it to keep sodas in at work.
  • If you're going to be using both an Athlon and a Peltier cooler, you should make sure your Power Supply can crank out a whole lot of current. For some more information on doing Peltier cooling well, check out the ars technica article [arstechnica.com] on the subject.
  • (sorry about the pun. It's early yet and the coffee hasn't cut in...)

    When doing thermal analysis, it's useful to make an analogy to electrical circuits. You convert heat flow into current, temperature into voltage, and thermal resistance into electrical resistance.

    That said, a normal Peltier module can generate about a 50 degree C drop with no thermal load (this is equivelent to the open circuit voltage of a battery), and move about 5 watts of heat with no heat difference (just like shorting a battery out and measuring the current).

    However, I read in EE Times [eetimes.com] (I think it was) about a new breakthrough in Peltier technology: by doping the module with a little Cesium, they got the open circuit temperature drop to 200 degrees C. Still won't move any more heat, but it'll move it over a larger temperature difference.


    Now, I wonder what will happen when those babies become available....

  • Buying a Peltier simply to prolong the life of the processor makes very little practical sense. The K7 600 is pretty cheap right now, well below $200, so buying a $200 cooler for a $175 processor is questionable.

    Beyond that, AMD designs the K7 to run at relatively high temperatures. Even at these high core temps (60C), the processor is designed to run for 10 years. 10 years ago, I spent $1500 on a really nice 386sx16 with 4MB RAM and a 40MB hard drive.

    Here's my recommendation. Overclock your 600 to 700 or so with air cooling (my K7 500 runs great with an Alpha cooler at 750 at 1.65v). 5 years from now, upgrade to a new motherboard and 3GHz processor ;-)

    r/

    Dave
  • I am about to purchase a Peltier to cool my K7 600. I'm not even going to overclock the processor! I'm trying to prolong the life of my processor (electron migration and all that jazz).

    I am considering a Swiftech MC2001 [swiftnets.com]. Has anyone out there, have any recommendations/reservations about this product? At $219, it's not cheap. Swiftech do make cheaper units, but I've learnt to buy the best that I can afford. Saves hassle and money in the long run.

  • Another thing to consider is, while I don't know what the operating life of a Peltier is, when they fail, they make a very nice thermal insulator between your processor and heatsink.

    Oh, and don't forget moisture tends to condense on them in humid weather. Which is not conducive to long processor life.
  • use your old Amiga 500 as a door wedge

    And thanks to its advanced multitasking capabilities, you can still run applications on it at the same time.

    Anyway, you missed one out - the ZX81 as a cheeseboard.
  • They are however very useful for certain situations where you need to achieve a bit more cooling that water could achieve but do not need to go all the way to refrigeration or similar. In the 1980's we used them to cool the photomultiplier detector on a Raman Spectrometer. The extra heat went into the cooling water.
  • don't go with a peltier, they generate tons of excess heat. while they may keep the CPU nice and cool all of the other peripherals will be hotter as a result. It's extremely rare for a CPU to quit functioning in only 5 years. However other components such as RAM and Harddrives(especially harddrives) fail far more often. Not to mention that they have a far lower MTBF (mean time between failure) when run in an overheated environment(which a peltier cooler will do to the rest of the components in your case.
    My advice would be to get a good heatsink-fan combo and a well ventilated case instead.
  • hey a great site for this stuff is www.peltec.f2s.com not quite done but....

  • Re:Peltier Purchase (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 09, 2000 @10:34PM (#1142470)
    Save your money! I have a Ppro 150 o/c'd to 180 that has been running 24/7 for three years with a cheap fan. Absolutly no problems yet. Even if your K7 dies in 1 year, you can take your $219 and buy a K8 1500. At my old job, we sold thousands and thousands of computer systems. The only processors that ever "died" were the early Cyrix chips that appeared to have the internal cache burn up. I recall only 10 or so of those coming back... ever.

  • Re:Peltier Purchase (Score:3)

    by Junta ( 36770 ) on Monday April 10, 2000 @02:13AM (#1142471)
    Ahh, but what would you have said 10 years ago? I had a 286 (well maybe less than 10 years..) and thought "cool, it runs what I want".. 386s came out and I thought, "neat toy, but anything I want to do can be done on my 286". 486s came out not too much later and I was beginning to feel the hurt of not being able to run the latest things, games became more complex, everyday applications got sloppier with alorithms because they could afford to.. Finally got a Pentium 60 when they FIRST came out (i.e. people said oh my god, you have a *Pentium*, that things kicks!) This thing beat the crap out of my 286 :) It could do everything I dreamt of! Nothing would need more! Three years later, It wasn't enough to do hardly anything that was coming out new, got a P200, which was fantastic and again I was the envy of my friends... Finally, a little over a year ago, I upgraded my P200 to an AMD k6/2 400, because the 200 was a bit sluggish, but probably wouldn't have bothered except someone was on a slooow system and wanted my P200.. Then it was fast and did great things, already it is what software makers tend to expect of home users.. I'm fine now, but I don't think it is ever safe to say "I plan to run it for over 10 years, I won't need any more processing power than that! "

  • Re:What fun! (Score:3)

    by voidzero ( 85458 ) on Monday April 10, 2000 @01:21AM (#1142472) Homepage
    There's a chap named Zak Oppong who has gone one better. In his Coca-Cola PC he uses real Coke to cool his system. I think you'll agree that this PC [tripod.co.uk] is quite visually arresting! Check out this link [tripod.co.uk] for more weird and wonderful machines he has built.

    I think this chap has made some good contributions to making computers more appealing to children, e.g. a PC built into a toy racing car and the Coke bottle PC, and recycling old parts to make some funky designs.

  • Re:Compatability (Score:3)

    by Kiz315 ( 135119 ) on Sunday April 09, 2000 @10:13PM (#1142473)
    Pepsi compatable? Pfft, what about Jolt compatable? Us hard-core caffeinds like cold drinks too, ya know!

    Anyone think they'll upgrade to 20 oz bottles?

    --

  • Compatability (Score:3)

    by sstrick ( 137546 ) on Sunday April 09, 2000 @10:00PM (#1142474)
    The site doesn't say whether this is Pepsi compatable or not.

  • BEWARE (Score:4)

    by Fizgig ( 16368 ) on Monday April 10, 2000 @03:03AM (#1142475)
    Ok, I have to make my usual peltier public-service announcement.

    A while ago I got a new K6-2-300 with a peltier, even though I don't overclock (don't ask). I also started running Linux on this computer. After about 2 months, the computer stopped working. It would give me some nice not-at-all informative beeps on bootup and that's about it. I couldn't understand it, until I finally thought to take out the processor. It was green.

    You see, most linux distros run the HLT command out of box, which is a command which "diasbles" idle parts of your CPU to save power (it's used in the Win9x programs Rain and Waterfall). But when you're using the HLT command on a computer which is idle a whole lot and which has WAY more active cooling than it actually needs, water will condense on your processor. Fortunately, this was actually covered by the warranty. But BEWARE!

    Now I disable the HLT command and test Mersenne primes just in case!

  • Cheap peltier modules (Score:4)

    by JamesSharman ( 91225 ) on Sunday April 09, 2000 @10:59PM (#1142476)
    Read this article I remembered a piece of email I received a week or two ago, these [bullnet.co.uk] people do 25watt peltier units for £25uk or 4 for £89uk, 100 watts of cooling power on a coke or pepsi (lets not be colaist) is probably sufficient.

  • Peltiers generate a heat difference (Score:5)

    by Dhericean ( 158757 ) on Sunday April 09, 2000 @10:13PM (#1142477)
    A peltier is the active equivalent of a thermo-couple. This means that there are two terminals and a voltage generates a temperature difference between them. Where as in a thermocouple the temperature difference generates a voltage.

    One terminal is normally in a heat buffer of some kind (ice bath, flowing water, etc.). If the voltage is applied one way then the second terminal will become hotter yes. But if the voltage is reversed then it becomes cooler. This is because the first terminal cannot become hotter as its temperatue is buffered.

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