> What's the advantage of thermo-electric cooling here over the traditional method?
1) It is quiet
2) It is easily electronically controllable based on the heat load in the water.
The heat sinks on the thermo-electrics are convection cooled and you could blow air over them but as you increase the thermal gradient between the heat sink and the air around them you are able to dump more heat. The only parameter you can vary with the typical heat exchange is "blow more air" you can't change the working temperature of the exchanger.
That said, the way power plants cool their water is in big evaporative cooling towers, but since I don't need a humidifier for the lab I stick with just convection cooling :-)
Re:Reusing Old Hardware
by neuralRiot on Friday October 26, 2018 @04:16PM
(#18312415)
I had something similar to this on my old P4x rig had watercooling with the radiators mounted horizontally outside the case, made a thermal controller for the fans and most of the time they where stopped or at maybe 40% speed, only with heavy loads they went faster. Now i have an arcooled I7 and the fans drive me nuts.
Re:Reusing Old Hardware
by newnewpdro on Friday October 26, 2018 @01:31AM
(#18307003)
Are you talking about using Peltier devices when referring to "thermo-electrics" here?
This is the part that sounds strange to me. Water cooling has its advantages, but the heat is almost always dumped from the water by pumping it through a radiator that has fans blowing air through it. What's the advantage of thermo-electric cooling here over the traditional method?