Everything Is Cooler With A Peltier

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.

Comments

What fun!

[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.

Re:What fun!

[voidzero]

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 is quite visually arresting! Check out this link 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:Cheap peltier modules

[Gleef]

JamesSharman wrote:

Read this article I remembered a piece of email I received a week or two ago, these 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. ;-)

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Better Idea: Give the $219 to me.

[Wakko Warner]

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

Now that's...

[Pig Hogger]

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

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What about a coffee warmer

[mudpup]

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.

Ars on Peltier

[Industrial Disease]

For those interested in the science behind this, Ars Technica is running a good piece on Peltier cooling, including a summary of how they work.
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LN2 to cool a can of coke

[MrChips]

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 made a Peltier fridge

[AaronW]

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. I use it to keep sodas in at work.

Re:Peltier Purchase

[Cuthalion]

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 on the subject.

If you think that's cool

[wowbagger]

(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 (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....

Re:Peltier Purchase - Huh?

[dgb2n]

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

Peltier Purchase

[voidzero]

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. 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.

Re:Peltier Purchase

[Darth Yoshi]

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.

Re:Peltier Purchase

[Anonymous Coward]

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

[Junta]

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:Way cool (ahem)

[luckykaa]

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.

Re:Peltiers generate a heat difference

[Dhericean]

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.

peltiers are bad for long term

[oog_rocks]

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.

Re:cooler

[freezerboy]

hey a great site for this stuff is www.peltec.f2s.com not quite done but....

Re:Compatability

[Kiz315]

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?

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Compatability

[sstrick]

The site doesn't say whether this is Pepsi compatable or not.

BEWARE

[Fizgig]

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

[JamesSharman]

Read this article I remembered a piece of email I received a week or two ago, these 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

[Dhericean]

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.