pelt with an aircooled?!?!
 

I'm a newb when it comes to pelts and I was wondering if its possible to use a peltier in conjuction with a plain heatsink and fan. If so what kind of heatsink should I buy and how difficult would it be to accomplish?

-Ugly

it'd be just fine with an 80w or 120w pelt and a big heatsink like an alpha pal8045 or pal8942, and a 60 or 80cfm fan. It'd also need to be on a low end P4 or P3 to get it to run cool enough. If you have an athlon forget about it

Brad sums it up quite right.

A Pelt simply transfer heat from one side to the other: it still needs to be cooled. The advantage is that they can lower a temperature below ambiant.

That being said, Pelts can be air-cooled, if they're low-power, but otherwise will require a water cooling solution. See Brad's recommendations for HS and fan.

This link might help:
http://www.dansdata.com/coolercomp.htm

Thanks for the reply guys. I have a couple more questions. What exactly is "cool enough"? And I was overclocking my Athlon 1 Ghz the other day stepping up the multiplier ratio. I set it low to start, 10.5, and it ran successfully but when I stepped the ratio up to 11 it dropped down to 900 Mhz instead of the 1100 Mhz I was expecting. I noticed by going higher it seemed to continue up normally, at 11.5 it went to 950 Mhz, at 12 it went back to 1000 Mhz, etc...Any ideas? I'm rather new to "extreme" computing and would like to know what I'm doing wrong, if anything.

-Ugly

just try re-pencilling the bridges, that can sometimes cause your multiplier problems.

I don't think you'd get good temps with air cooled pelts on a tbird 1000, it just produces too much heat

Brad is pretty much right, but I'm not sure if I would stick a 120w peltier on a heatsink... seems like a bit much to me. 90 would be about my max. Your best bet is to find a Tualatin P3 to do it on. They run VERY cool at VERY low voltages and overclock well. Northwoods are probably fine too. Check Swiftech out. They used to make peltier air cooling kits. I think they still do.
-Kev

120w is too much for most heatsinks, but I'm sure an alpha 8942 with a high powered fan would handle it. Or an alpha P3125

It's generally agreed throughout this forum that a Pelt can be air-cooled if it's rated for less than 80W transfer.

You need to lookup the Power dissipation of the CPU you use, then add (at least) 25% to that number. That will give you the required Pelt rating.

Of course the more powerfull, the better :D

You can then expect your CPU temp to drop below freezing (at idle) and stay around 10C at full load. This of course means that you'll have to isolate it for moisture from condensation. See Swiftech's site for more info.

Of course if you want to get fancy... you do what I'm fixing to do: make (buy) a variable power supply that will keep the CPU at the highest temperature that it can be cooled at (i.e. at full load).

that sounds like a good idea. do you know if PWM would work with a peltier? ie, pulsing the peltier. i ask because i made a neato thermal PWM circuit that i'd like to use to hold the temperature constant.

Actually Pelts don't take too well to voltage fluctuations. Nice idea though.