Thermoelectric Cooling Modules (Peltier cooling devices) sound great when you first hear about them, but it takes engineering and a lot of power to make them work. Remember, your goal is to get the heat from the inside of the PC to the outside, so you can't just slap one or two on the case and be finished. You need to be a fanatic to make this all work.
The three greatest heat-generating devices in your PC are the power supply, the cpu, and the hard drive. Many PC chipsets and video cards now also have chips that require heatsinks and need to be cooled somehow.
Cooling your power supply with a TCM is pretty difficult because PC power supplies aren't designed to be cooled that way. Remember that your power supply fan draws air through the case and then uses that air to cool itself in addition to other components. Taking the airflow away makes the PS die, and often you lose other parts with it. One way to pull off cooling the PS would be to mount it on the outside of the case without a fan and depend on convection to cool it. I've done this successfully on machines I wanted to be reliable (fans often fail).
Next comes the cpu. I've substituted Winchips for Intel cpus (up to 333 Mhz) with large heatsinks, again with the goal of reliability, and eliminated the cpu fan. Intel or AMD cpus generally require a lot of cooling, however. If you cool them with a TCM, you need an even bigger heatsink and a fan blowing over it to get all that heat to somewhere else. If you enjoy fluid dynamics, you can design a heat pump with tubes that silently pump coolant through the heatsink and on to the outside of the computer. Otherwise, a low power cpu is your best bet. Hunt up a Winchip, or look into the Transmeta Crusoe.
The hard drive needs cooling too, but you might be able to get enough cooling by bolting it tightly to a cool portion of your case. Check the drive specifications for power dissipation. One other reply suggested Fujitsu drives, but I'll caution you that my luck with Fujitsus (about 30) has been extremely poor. There are some nice low-power Seagate and IBM designs that will last longer. One alternative to a hard drive, though, is a solid state storage device. My choice was Disk-On-Chip, but be aware that this is expensive storage!
Contrary to what someone else said, the practical limit to regular SCSI is about 6 feet of cable. If you want to put your drives somewhere else, you'll probably want LVD SCSI, Fibre Channel, or Firewire.
Does all of this sound crazy? It is! Go buy your self a Macintosh (the cpu dissipates a few watts) without a fan. Throw a firewire drive on it and put the drive in another room. Voila. Silent computer. No hard drive noise. You're finished, and you've got one less piece of Bill Gates goodness to worry about. That new Apple Cube is pretty spiffy-looking, and without a drive it should be utterly silent and fairly reliable, er, to boot.
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Thermoelectric Cooling Modules (Peltier cooling devices) sound great when you first hear about them, but it takes engineering and a lot of power to make them work. Remember, your goal is to get the heat from the inside of the PC to the outside, so you can't just slap one or two on the case and be finished. You need to be a fanatic to make this all work.
The three greatest heat-generating devices in your PC are the power supply, the cpu, and the hard drive. Many PC chipsets and video cards now also have chips that require heatsinks and need to be cooled somehow.
Cooling your power supply with a TCM is pretty difficult because PC power supplies aren't designed to be cooled that way. Remember that your power supply fan draws air through the case and then uses that air to cool itself in addition to other components. Taking the airflow away makes the PS die, and often you lose other parts with it. One way to pull off cooling the PS would be to mount it on the outside of the case without a fan and depend on convection to cool it. I've done this successfully on machines I wanted to be reliable (fans often fail).
Next comes the cpu. I've substituted Winchips for Intel cpus (up to 333 Mhz) with large heatsinks, again with the goal of reliability, and eliminated the cpu fan. Intel or AMD cpus generally require a lot of cooling, however. If you cool them with a TCM, you need an even bigger heatsink and a fan blowing over it to get all that heat to somewhere else. If you enjoy fluid dynamics, you can design a heat pump with tubes that silently pump coolant through the heatsink and on to the outside of the computer. Otherwise, a low power cpu is your best bet. Hunt up a Winchip, or look into the Transmeta Crusoe.
The hard drive needs cooling too, but you might be able to get enough cooling by bolting it tightly to a cool portion of your case. Check the drive specifications for power dissipation. One other reply suggested Fujitsu drives, but I'll caution you that my luck with Fujitsus (about 30) has been extremely poor. There are some nice low-power Seagate and IBM designs that will last longer. One alternative to a hard drive, though, is a solid state storage device. My choice was Disk-On-Chip, but be aware that this is expensive storage!
Contrary to what someone else said, the practical limit to regular SCSI is about 6 feet of cable. If you want to put your drives somewhere else, you'll probably want LVD SCSI, Fibre Channel, or Firewire.
Does all of this sound crazy? It is! Go buy your self a Macintosh (the cpu dissipates a few watts) without a fan. Throw a firewire drive on it and put the drive in another room. Voila. Silent computer. No hard drive noise. You're finished, and you've got one less piece of Bill Gates goodness to worry about. That new Apple Cube is pretty spiffy-looking, and without a drive it should be utterly silent and fairly reliable, er, to boot.
Good luck!
Dave Klingler