Past Submission
Submitted: August 11, 2008 DeviantART

Now for the moment you’ve all been waiting for… well for those who love playing around with electronics and for those computer gaming nerds myself included.

I finally managed to take a few pictures of Kevin’s tower, the friend that commissioned me to develop and design a means to cool his computer down. Hmmm… where to start, this project has almost been 8 months in the running, but I must say I’m very impressed with the outcome and the results. ^^

Initially my idea was to use the same principal fridges or freezers use, which entails pressurizing Freon. This gas has the affinity to absorb heat which has very good endothermic properties when pressurized and similarly the opposite when depressurized making it exothermic i.e. gives off heat. Ok well if you want to know more about how a fridge works just Google it.

Obviously the principal sounded very cool excuse the pun, but at the end of the day it would work out to be too expensive. Therefore I decided to look a cheaper and more accessible solution and active cooling is what spring to mind. Active coolers or TEC (Thermoelectric Coolers) are in essence heat pumps. In Laymen terms two porcelain plates roughly about the same size as a processor are separated by square cubes of a specific metal arranged in many columns and rows.

You have a positive and negative terminal and when you put power onto the device it moves electrons from one side to another very rapidly and thus drawing heat from one side i.e. making it ice cold and heating up the other.

Wikipedia best describes the process, thermoelectric cooling uses the Peltier effect to create a heat flux between the junction of two different types of materials. A Peltier cooler or thermoelectric heat pump is a solid-state active heat pump which transfers heat from one side of the device to the other side against the temperature gradient (from cold to hot).

An average heat pump powered at 12V @ 5.6A makes the cold side reach 0 Degrees or below whilst the hot side reaches almost 90-110 Degrees. One must remember that in order for the heat pump to be effective the heat from the hot side must dissipate heat as efficiently as possible for the device to remain efficient. If not heat will spill over onto the cold side and equilibrium will occur.

Ok enough about the electronics and I’m sure I’ve already made some mistakes so if you want better info just Google it. I used a 44x40x4mm 12V @ 5.6A i.e. 54 Watt heat pump and a internal slim line duel rail power supply 12V @ 8.5A to power the heat pump and three standard computer fans mounted on the side of the tower.

I used 3 fans 80x25mm 12V @ 0.14A with metal grids to ventilate the heat produced by the heat pump, the process and other heat producing components out the back of the tower to maintain efficiency. If you are wondering where the heat pump is it’s located between the processor and the heat sink insulated with fiber glass rag to separate the hot side from the cold side.

There are many areas for improvement and expansion for example you could add another heat pump to the graphics card, but remember then you would have to get a stronger power supply somewhere along the lines of a 12V @ 12-15Amps in order to power the 2 heat pumps. To further boost efficiency I encased his hard drives in aluminum Cool Drive unites.

Here are his computer specifications:

Gigabyte K8N Triton nForce 4 motherboard
AMD Duel Core 4800+
NVIDIA GForce 7900gtx, 512MB
2x 250GB HDD Western Digital
20x LG DVD-R/RW Lightscribe
2GB RAM

I also included an internal/external & time digital thermometer and the fans are mounted on Perspex. Initially his tower was white so I also done a custom paint job as well to enhance the towers appearance a bit. To cut a long story short the heat pump is extremely efficient because the processor idles around 3-5 Degrees and 15-25 when multitasking with Photoshop and a 3D environmental rendering program.

When playing a graphics dependent game like Crysis which before I installed this new system usually ran his processor in the region of 40-55 Degrees! Now his processor peaks around 30-35 Degrees. The case temperature also drops about five Degrees. I personally think this system is very efficient mainly because the lifetime for a heat pump is around 200000 running hours i.e. 15-20 Years of usage and the nice thing is it does not cause condensation.

You could implement this system in conjunction with water or oil cooling, but that is another project. Therefore if anyone is interested I’m open for commissions. To roughly give anyone an estimate on how much it will cost will entirely depend on the tower. An estimate of R1800.00 Incl. VAT and for overseas clients I would have to add on the shipping fee as well.

Nuzzles,

LeoRa