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

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.