Simpele peltier upgrade voor waterkoeling
 

I've been running WC for a while now, got a Core i7 960 and a HD5870 running in 1 loop with a 360 rad with Scythe Ultra Kaze 3000. It's cool but I need cooler.|D

Saw this company and the HME2009 fair in the netherlands where a company displayed their peltier cooling solution, their goal is to get peltier cooling to the masses by supplying an easy to mount peltier solution.

The only thing needed according to the company(MadMouse) is a 2nd pump and reservoir and ofcourse their unit. Power consumption isn't a problem, got a Silverstone Strider 1500Watt.

What are your thoughts on this thing, probablt going to get a 400Watt and 200Watt unit from them.

there are some commercial products which use peltier to increase cooling performance, like the CoolIT product series; in my experience they don't offer a better performance/noise ratio compared to air cooling;

adding them to your custom water loop might drop the water temp a few degrees, but in my humble opinion the consumed wattage and extra cost is too high; if you want an upgrade from your WC; go phase change; entry level units are ~€400 and they'll offer noticeably lower temps;

we had several forum members here who used phase change cooling on their 24/7 workstations for more than a year; so it can be used for daily computing.

in the end though, the question would be: why do you want to run that Core i7 960 at lower temperature? a higher overclock , even if you manage to squeeze out an extra 500Mhz, won't translate into a real-world performance boost.

I would rather invest that money to remove another bottleneck, install an SSD, if you already have on, get a second bigger one :)

I have considered the Coolit solution, but it is custom enough. I would need 1 for my CPU AND 1 for my GPU, 2 product from them equal over 800 euros. so id be cheaper with the above solution. It will even give me the option if i decide to cool my chipset and RAM.

The same goed for phase change, 2 big units to cool everything, I want MAX cooling and MAX performance in 1 case.

Your GPU could use your current cooling setup, without the CPU in the loop, the temps will be quite low and you can easily OC and overvolt it; the GPU is not as hot as the CPU :)

The problem I've been facing isn't GPU Core temp related it's GPU voltera chip related, with my current OC of 1050MHz on the Core and some heavy stressing, the Voltera chips get around 90-100C with the Peltier setup I hope it will lower the temps to round-a-bout 70-80C giving me that little bit of extra headroom, especially with summer just around the block.

you'd need a water block that covers all those areas, or add a fan and heatsink to those voltera chips

the EK-FC5870 is a fullcover block that cools the volterra chips, but those chips are sheer madness. My water temps are already near ambient temperatures. But I need lower, the easiest way seems via the unit I mentioned earlier. |D

have you tried the loop with the CPU? Maybe you can get away with a high end heatsink for the CPU (TR IFX-14 or Noctua nh-d14)

Sorry I don't get what you're trying to say.

remove the water block from the CPU, see if your WC loop handles the heat of the HD 5870 :)

It can handle the heat, under load the water temperature of my loop doesn't get above 25C in an 17C room.

GPU load temp is 40 and CPU Load temp is 55C, it's just the volterra chips that get to hot.

bad contact between the water block and the chips perhaps? if the water block is cooling the chips, and they're overheating, I would look into contact area issues

The Volterra chips are know to get extremely hot, they get hot with air, and hot with water, on air I could get tot 975MHz OC before the Volterra chips get to hot, with the waterblock that bar gets raised tot 1050MHz, the next step would be to go even colder, which I would like to achieve via said TEC unit. As normal TEC units don't cover ram,volterra chips.

in that case I would not try to chill the water, but try to find a way to install either a heatsink/TEC/waterblock combo; would be quite custom, but provide better results than chilling the water, which requires a whole lot more energy; it's possible for sure, but instead of one 80W TEC, you'll need 4x200W TECs and have less success.

maybe ask a test unit from that company to evaluate? :)

Since you say your water temps are near ambient and this is still too hot for the Voltera chips then I'd look carefully at the design of that full body block and see if any water is passing directly over those. You might see better results with a block that has flow directly over the chips in question. Most full-body blocks only rely on indirect cooling for misc chips other than the RAM/core, but I haven't seen the block/card in question so I can't say for sure with yours. I did take a quick glance at it, what are you using between the Voltera chips and the edge of the block?

To be honest I think you are overestimating the results you would see with peltiers, even if they were as efficient as they seem when you push components past their design capabilities they are going to get hot regardless of how you cool them. (I have done chilled WCing in the past, dropping the water temp to 3c got ~200Mhz more out of a Q6600 over my previous highest OC and I had condensation over everything...)

I am also not confident about the power connector, either the peltier units in that photo are weaker than you expect or it will be drawing a huge amount of current through just that single PCIe connector... I'm guessing they are just weaker than you are expecting. 400W would actually burn up that cable. ;)

Ignoring the capability questions of the units for the moment... To see the kind of results you want you would have to drop the water temps to the point you would have condensation on all of your tubing and would need to insulate all of it. If you're going to go through all of that work you might as well go phase and get some real results with exponentially better cooling. Such as this one, if you could find a GPU block for that card... You might look around, if you're that earnest about dropping the temps then you might even have a custom fitting made for the voltage chips. If nothing else a custom waterblock that gave them equal priority as the GPU core would definitely help.