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Hardware

Asetek's Extreme CPU Cooler Tested 174

Posted by Zonk from the brrrr dept.
VL writes "Do-It-Yourself Phase Change Cooling Systems are built and used by a few folks, but they can be complicated to build, mostly messy, and dangerous; certainly not something you should get into without knowing what you are doing. But as with anything like this, there is always a turn key solution brought to market you can buy. Enter asetek, and their VapoChill series of Phase Change Cooling systems. What we have on the review bench here specifically is the asetek VapoChill Lightspeed [AC], a case separate enclosure containing a Phase Change Cooling system for your PC's CPU."
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Asetek's Extreme CPU Cooler Tested More

Asetek's Extreme CPU Cooler Tested

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  • Now (Score:2, Funny)

    by odaen ( 766778 )
    ... that's COOL!

  • Whoopty do (Score:5, Informative)

    by stratjakt ( 596332 ) on Sunday March 06, 2005 @07:41PM (#11861471) Journal
    Some "tech" site, populated by 13 year old overclockers who know shit about how a computer works, and it shows (ie; they think they need to cool their CPU to sub-0 temps to make it work), reviews a product thats been around forever (and is nothing but a repurposed sushi bar cooler).

    "Nothing for you to see here" indeed.

    • Re:Whoopty do (Score:4, Insightful)

      by rpozz ( 249652 ) on Sunday March 06, 2005 @08:12PM (#11861668)
      Flamebait? He's right. They seem to have benchmarked a CPU at THE SAME CLOCK SPEED with or without the Vapochill. Now, how the hell does temperature effect performance when the thing is running at the same clock speed (feel free to correct me)?

      • Re:Whoopty do (Score:4, Insightful)

        by stratjakt ( 596332 ) on Sunday March 06, 2005 @08:18PM (#11861695) Journal
        Man those sites are the bane of computer science today.

        If I hear one more 13 year old talk about how the fancy new copper heatspreaders on his DDR RAM gave him 5 more FPS in Doom 3, I swear I'm going to snap his greasy little neck.

        Then again, big ups to the makers of all this "extreme PC gear". For instance, this vapochil deal, bought as a sushi bar cooler (which is what it is), would cost about 75 bucks. They turn around, mod it a little bit, jam it in a 20 dollar case and sell it for hundreds.

        Or taking the heater core for a car, anodizing (or just spraypainting) it black, and selling it for 100+ plus as an "Xtreme PC radiator".

        Or taking a 50 dollar aquarium pump and selling it for 100+ as an "Xtreme PC cooling pump".

        Or, the piece of resistance, 50 cents worth of milled copper being sold as an "Xtreme PC waterblock".

        Fools and their money..
        • The new heatsinks on my RAM gave me a +12FPS in HL2, but for a rather convoluted reason.

          Basically, they let me shift heat away from the mobo (and hence the graphics card and CPU) fast enough (when combined with the big exhaust fans) to allow components to be overclocked without melting...

          But yeah I do get your point. Mine is a really obscure example of why putting RAMsinks on helped, but people who just bolt on all manner of heat exchangers, use the latest funkily named thermal grease, and then claim they
        • ....3) PROFIT!

        • Re:Whoopty do (Score:3, Insightful)

          by boarder ( 41071 )
          OK, most of what you said is both true and insightful, which is why I bought the heater core for a car, the aquarium pump and scientific tubing instead of the Xtreme stuff most sites sell. The one mistake you made was the waterblock remark.

          Yes, it is only 50 cents worth of copper, but you kind of need that thing that mills it out. I certainly don't have anything here in my toolbox that can mill out a piece of copper. I also don't have ready access to a machine shop that would be willing to do it for me.
      • At sub 0 temperatures the silicon pathways freeze over and get all slippery. The little electrons slide so much faster then. That's why everything goes faster!!1!
        • Actually, you just described superconducting to a limited extent. Resistance is often thought of as "bumps in the road" that an electron is travelling on, and superconducting does smooth things over, reducing resistance to 0. Of course, they aren't getting anything nearly cold enough to superconduct, and if they were, well, that would be noteworthy in and of itself.
    • What are you going to do? Start your own website in your treehouse and get all your little friends to come? I'd like to see that!
    • http://www.viperlair.com/images/reviews/cooling/mi sc/asetek/vpls/tmpg1.gif "Bottom line is that a CPU will perform with greater efficiency at lower temperatures, which this test shows in a practical manner. Only the cooling solution was changed here, no extra voltage, no memory tweaks or anything, just plain and simple temperatures. It isn't a big drop, but of course this gap will widen if you convert a longer clip." please tell me this is a joke
      • I think you misquoted them. That should read "I have no idea what the fuck a clock even is."

      • Re:Whoopty do (Score:2, Insightful)

        by tehdaemon ( 753808 )
        It's a P4. Remember they slow their clock down if the chip gets too hot. Encoding software fills the pipeline pretty well, that's why the P4 does so well at it. So the chip used a lot of power. My guess is that stock cooling just isn't good enough on high-clockspeed P4's.

        Redo this on a slower P4 or an athlon{XP,64} and I don't think that you will see a difference. That said, if they did not do several trials of this test ..... 0.5% difference is likely less than the margin of error.

    • and why was there no mention of noise?? Sorry but any review of a cooling system is worthless without covering how noisy the system is. There review didn't do the main thing a review is suppose to do: tell me what I need to know to decide whether to purchase the product. What if I dropped $750+ [jab-tech.com] on a system just to find out it's too loud to sit next to for 16 hours a day?

      They should have measured the sound somehow. 5 years ago PC noise wasn't a major concern, but now days you'll never read a review of

      • $750?! You'd have to be incredibly stupid to buy it then. For that sort of money you could probably get a dual CPU system with decent cooling instead.

        It also weighs 50lbs. Enough said.
      • They DID talk about noise in the conclusion. It's loud, but you can alter the speed of the fans. Most of the noise apparently comes from the compressor, though.
        • " They DID talk about noise in the conclusion. It's loud..."

          OHHHHHH!!!!!! I'm sorry, did u say they said it was loud? Oh great well that clears up everything since they said it was "loud".

          So if the next CPU/hard drive/video card review i read says "it's fast" is that good enough?

          • Again, RTFA. They describe the noise the system makes in the conclusion, and offer information on how to possibly reduce or control it. Also, how the heck can you expect them to possibly quantify how loud the system is? dBa meters that are in any way accurate are NOT cheap or easy to come by, not to mention that a dBa reading depends on how far you are from the system, where you're measuring from in relation to it, etc. There's simply now way to make a quantifiable measurement of the loudness of a system th

  • Nothing new here (Score:5, Informative)

    by Husgaard ( 858362 ) on Sunday March 06, 2005 @07:47PM (#11861512)
    If you believe that Phase Change Cooling systems is something new, please have a look at your refrigerator.

    This is the most widespread method of cooling.

    • Re:Nothing new here (Score:2, Insightful)

      by joNDoty ( 774185 )
      The article itself says that it's the same technology as your fridge. They're not trying to pull the wool over your eyes -- they're applying the technology to your computer.

      Personally, I think this is a giant step in the wrong direction seeing as many people are opting to go fan-less just to avoid all the usual noise a PC makes. This unit is gonna make your PC buzz - like a fridge.
      • Not to mention consume way more power.

        I would love to start seeing more cases come with 120mm fan mounts and mainboards with more precise fan RPM control, but alas, very few of either exist.
        • This [simline.com.au] Antec case not only comes with a 120mm fan, but the hard drives are mounted using rubber grommets so as to reduce the transfer of vibration to the case.

          I bought a fairly extreme PC recently (based on that whacky Gigabyte dual-GPU video card, the 3D1) and there are two fans on the video card, a chipset fan, a fan on a little power supply daughter board, the CPU fan (I chose a Zalman 7000-series), two fans in the power supply (also Antec) and that one big 120mm fan at the back. It's not silent, but when

          • Ugh...doors on computer cases - another one of my peeves. Those things are just asking to be broken.

            I'm trying to find this one case as I type that has a huge front fan on it that looks like a turbofan intake.

            Oh, here, I found it. [newegg.com]

            Pretty cool, though probably too tacky for some. Looks nice and quiet (the fan supposedly runs at a pretty low RPM) I probably would avoid it just because it wouldn't be easy to replace the nonstandard fan if it were to break. Plus, the door thing.

        • Re:Nothing new here (Score:3, Interesting)

          by nbert ( 785663 )
          IMO bigger/better fans are just good for fighting the symptoms. We are just heading the wrong way - instead of integrating mobile technology into desktop computers we basically invest the same money into designs which can dissipate more heat.

          I think it wouldn't really be much more expensive to produce CPUs with a low TDP (if they are produced on a big scale) and I definitely believe that it would be cheaper in the long run, because those fans and heatsinks etc. wouldn't be necessary anymore.

          I really hope

          • Re:Nothing new here (Score:3, Interesting)

            by Zorilla ( 791636 )
            I thought the use of Pentium M CPUs in desktops was the movement toward this sort of thing. What's AMD doing with their low-to-midrange processors these days? I ask because I just recently built an Athlon XP 2700+ desktop machine for my parents and cooling-wise, it could have performed a bit better. 57 degrees C idle and 63 under a full load when using fans on the power supply and CPU. The case is uncluttered and quite open (Another thing Serial ATA is good for). That's quite hot, but so far the computer is

            • I thought the use of Pentium M CPUs in desktops was the movement toward this sort of thing.

              Last time I checked the desktop boards supporting the Pentium M didn't really use many of the features it has for preserving power and they are still quite expensive.
              Maybe I was wrong and we are to blame the customers. If there was a real demand for such solutions the price would drop rapidly. On the other hand many developments in the x86 world were driven by marketing, which really makes me wonder why Intel and

        • Not to mention consume way more power.
          Especially since this vapochill has to expel the heat somewhere, right? So you've got a little cooler (this device) cooled by a bigger cooler (air conditioning). Now if you could vent the vapochill directly outdoors (like a clothesdryer) that might be neat.
          • Not only does this Vapochill have to emit the waste heat somewhere, but it comes with extra heating coils you need to put in your PC to prevent condensation from forming!

            I bet half the noise emitted by this device is the spinning sound of your electric meter zinging along like a ninja throwing star.

    • Re:Nothing new here (Score:5, Informative)

      by Arathrael ( 742381 ) on Sunday March 06, 2005 @07:57PM (#11861580)
      To be fair, it's not like the article claims otherwise:

      "Phase Change Cooling systems like the VapoChill are essentially not all that different from the fridge that's likely in your kitchen right now, however of course the end application is different."

      Goes into a fair amount of detail, not a bad read if you don't know much about it.

    • Re:Nothing new here (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Why am I looking at my refrigerator again? Should I put my computer inside of it?

      I didn't read anything about phase change cooling being new. In fact I didn't even read anywhere about the idea of phase change cooling being used to cool a microprocessor being new. Its just a review on the newest member of the VapoChill line of products.
    • Why are they reviewing it NOW? They have been out for atleast 5 years!
    • please have a look at your refrigerator.

      Check. Yup, my blueberry yogurt beats their overclocked pentium at Folding@Home by sixty-five million percent. Overclocking, pfff...
    • Actually if you really wanna get old school, take a look at your skin. Evaporative cooling is how humans have been cooled for at least 100,000 years.

      Or even better, look at your cooler full of beer, once again that is some old school phase change cooling. Yep, solid ice to liquid water is a phase change.

      • Or even better, look at your cooler full of beer, once again that is some old school phase change cooling.

        Nothing like those Phase Change Cooled beers. Not matter how many fans I direct at my beer, they always are cooler when I get them from the fridge.

        Yep, solid ice to liquid water is a phase change.

        Yes, just try to melt crushed ice by adding salt. Don't be surprised to measure temperatures belov -50 degrees celcius. But too cold for a beer if you ask me, and colder than needed by a CPU.

  • Looked up on Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] . If I read the article right, most refrigerators use this awesome phase change [wikipedia.org] cooling technology. Lame publicity stunt..

  • turn key maybe.. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by gl4ss ( 559668 ) on Sunday March 06, 2005 @07:48PM (#11861518) Homepage Journal
    newbie(stupid - newbie can use it if he bothers to read and understands what the thing is and how it works) friendly? probably not.

    definetely cool shit though. but a bit out of budget for most of us(you need the best rig you can get for it to make sense to get a vapo for oc'ing it to the maximum, because vapo's aint cheap with non-top-of-the-line components the money is better spent buying a faster cpu, more memory and such).
    • If you're going to pay this much for a cooling system to compensate for the overclocking you've done, couldn't you just pay for a faster processor?

      Once you have the top-of-the-line processor, what need is there for overclocking? What possible task could you have that would be that CPU intensive. Sure, there are some, but those are few and far between. I think this really comes down to (as was said earlier) a bunch of 13 year olds trying to show up their middle school buddies with how much they overclo
      • You fail basic overlock 101. Overclocking really isn't about performance anymore (who needs an extra 100mhz?), it's about the challenge. I currently run a water cooled setup and to know they my cooling is one of only a few (there are thosands of people who water cool their PC's but even that is a very small percentage of the n00b population) of the best in the world makes for good bragging rights.

        • Re:turn key maybe.. (Score:4, Informative)

          by tomstdenis ( 446163 ) <tomstdenis@gma[ ]com ['il.' in gap]> on Sunday March 06, 2005 @08:47PM (#11861844) Homepage
          I run a Gentoo Linux on 2.2Ghz AMD64 based system that doesn't crash and gets uptimes that spans the distance between kernels [shock: yes I actually update my kernel...]. Compared to my windows using friends with uptimes ranging in the HOURS department.... I'm leapyears ahead ;-)

          Getting an extra 100Mhz on your cpu isn't impressive. Getting an extra 10% speed boost on an already seemingly optimized/efficient algo is impressive.

          I mean I could reboot at a HT speed of 210 and say "voila 110 extra Mhz". It would raise the core temperature probably by 1C and get me little noticeable performance.

          Oh and btw with a $36 [CAD] "SilentBoost K8" my AMD64 is currently idling at 24.5C and my heatsink fan makes little noise [iirc it's rated at 20dB]. At full busy I get around 42-48C range where the max temp for the cpu is ~70C and I've never seen my cpu above 52C.

          So really you need to follow some simple steps
          • Buy a more efficient cpu (K8 or PM) that can perform the same or more work with less power (I don't care what the TDP of the K8 is, it makes way less heat than a comparable P4 and I know this for a fact since I've had a P4 at one point)
          • Grow up
          • Appreciate "hard work"


          Tom
        • You're definitely right in that a lot of overclocking is a "badge" among the aficionados. By way of analogy look at some of the sports cars out there that can top out over 190 MPH; yet they sit there on I-35 in traffic, same as the rest of us. They just look much cooler doing it.

          Anyway, yes, overclocking used to be about gaining 100 MHz here or 200 MHz there (hell, I remember overclocking a PC-AT from 6MHz to 8MHz.) But according to TFA, the Vapochill let him take his P4 540 up an additional 1200 MHz,

      • What possible task could you have that would be that CPU intensive

        Table joins involving more than 50M rows each. Although this is also heavily memory speed dependent too. So forget this pansy CPU cooler; I want a stock solution that immerses an enterprise class server in a non-conductive bath of coolant all the chips involved can be overclocked. Umm, except the HDD bays.
  • They could certainly use some stronger cooling on their servers...

  • Heh. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 06, 2005 @07:53PM (#11861554)
    My favourite part of this oh-so-professional review is when they try to deduce the "fact" that "CPUs work at higher efficency when running at lower temperatures" by comparing the time some video-encoding takes @stock speed, and the vapochilled setup acchieving a result better a whole TWO SECONDS than the default one (with the complete encoding-job taking about 400secs or so).

    Now that surely justifies a maybe 700US$ investment, and is by no means an effect called "measuring tolerance".

    Great job. -_-

    • Re:Heh. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Nasarius ( 593729 ) on Sunday March 06, 2005 @08:53PM (#11861891)
      They seem to have used only one trial, as well. Anyone who didn't sleep through their junior high science class should know how to design a better experiment, and that a ~0.5% difference is typically experimental error, not a significant difference.

      • Re:Heh. (Score:3, Insightful)

        by gl4ss ( 559668 )
        yes but if you're just writing crap to get free stuff then it doesn't matter apparently what you write.

        what's bad about is that now dozens of idiots without clue are going to use this as 'proof'.

  • Heh heh... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Rod Beauvex ( 832040 ) on Sunday March 06, 2005 @07:53PM (#11861555)
    I prefer the nitrogen/oxygen mixture myself. I plan to move on to using a dihydrogen monoxide based system in the future, though.

  • What about more effective ways (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ioudas ( 865464 ) on Sunday March 06, 2005 @07:54PM (#11861564) Homepage
    Back when modding was almost the best thing to do since eat sliced bread these things were out. I once heard that you can actully dunk your whole pc into a coolant that is not conductive and then make that cooling liquid sub zero. I also had a freeon based system with forced air going once. I mean really these units are expensive. Anyone know of any low cost high grade cooling?
    • You might be thinking about this [octools.com] mentionned on /. here [slashdot.org] and this [octools.com] mentionned again on /. http://slashdot.org/articles/00/09/17/1427248.shtm l.
      They were using Fluorinert, made by 3M at 500$/gallon. That's not cheap..

    • I've seen a standard TV operating while completely submersed in liquid fluorocarbon (note: note chlorofluorocarbon (CFC)). As the liquid is non-condusive, the electronics come to absolutely no harm. Keep it cool, and provide some currant to keep the liquid flowing, and I'd imagine you'd have an expensive, workable solution.

      Personally, however, I think a better system would be something akin to running a sterling engine in reverse. By rotating the crankshaft via an electric motor, you'll produce heat on

      • You might want to look at peltier devices [heatsink-guide.com]. No moving parts, all semiconductor. The overclocking crowd experimented with them years ago, but I think they turned out to be too unreliable. They were usually used inbetween the CPU and heatsink/fan to cool the CPU while making the heatsink hotter. The problem (from what I gather) is that when when (not if) they failed, they suddenly become an insulator between your CPU and heatsink. Not good.

  • That was a waste of time (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The reviewer believes that cooling a processor makes it run faster...
  • ... just put the whole tower inside a cheap fridge (or freezer). Drill a few holes to pass thru AC and KVM+USB connections.

    • i played with that, the problem you run into is condisation. atleast the ones i ran into. Id rather have a totally enclosed pc than one open to air. Buying a new motherboard after your ice cubes melt isnt exactly what i consider a solid design
    • Everyone always talks about sticking their comp inside a 'fridge, but I've never seen it done. Most refridges cant cool enough quickly to and it will just run constantly.

  • Come on this is all old hat... (Score:5, Funny)

    by MosesJones ( 55544 ) on Sunday March 06, 2005 @08:05PM (#11861640) Homepage

    1) Go and look at your fridge.

    2) If you want your chip REALLY cold
    a) Host in deep-space
    b) Rotate winters in the Artic/Antartic

    3) If you want your chip REALLY REALLY cold
    a) Get your wife to stand next to the box, then tell her you've forgotten her birthday.

    4) And for the ultimate in cold, you just need to create the conditions where Bill Gates admits publically that he prefers Linux.

  • Coral link (Score:4, Informative)

    by DuSTman31 ( 578936 ) on Sunday March 06, 2005 @08:20PM (#11861706)
    Site seems a bit slow.. Coralised link [nyud.net].

  • Is it worth it? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by ein2many ( 850712 )
    For 1500 dollars I can buy a better CPU,mobo and graphic card to get my computer as fast or faster than overclocking my current one.
  • Don't they just make a perfect match with this Frankenst_in_ piece of ricer crap? Last week I drooled over a Dual G5 silence. Is it on? Oh yeah, the disk spins and, ah! that Panther desktop. Sweet, come back when there's some computer to match.

    The hype machine always has some new crappy potion to sell. Shame that those perfect designs, turning points set in stone, only happen every so much; quality is not for the masses (not that they can't afford it... this fridge isn't exactly cheap).

  • Company name... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I swear I keep thinking they're called Asstek

  • Lava Lamp (Score:3, Funny)

    by HermanAB ( 661181 ) on Sunday March 06, 2005 @09:14PM (#11862028)
    Why not put your PC in a transparent case and fill it with two colour oil? Then you can boast about 20th century technology - way better than the 19th century technology these guys are flogging.

  • Surely this misses the point. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ross.w ( 87751 ) <rwonderley.gmail@com> on Sunday March 06, 2005 @09:15PM (#11862030) Journal
    Doesn't it bother anyone that these types of extreme measures are necessary in the first place?

    Isn't it about time Intel, AMD et al developed CPUs that don't get hot enough to cook an egg on?
    • Intel's Pentium-M line is perfectly content to run fanless. It's used in laptops as part of the Centrino platform, though Intel plans to use dual-core Pentium-Ms as their future desktop CPU direction. AMD's Athlon 64 processors, while not nearly as efficient as the Pentium-M, suck down about half the power of an equivalent Pentium 4. They're perfectly happy running with a decently engineered heatsink and quiet fan. It's really only the Intel Pentium 4, with its 150W power dissipation on high end models, tha

  • And theve only been trading for 3 years... (Score:3, Informative)

    by NoMercy ( 105420 ) on Sunday March 06, 2005 @09:21PM (#11862055)
    Come on, if were going to have slashvertisments can we at least have them for new products, not things which have been araound for so long theve been reviwed by virtually every overclockers forum and site.
  • There's no need for anything more than a decent heatsink/fan.

    I think I paid somewhere in the $30s for my HSF, and I probably spent too much money. Hell, before I had this one, I just used the stock HSF, and only switched because my new motherboard wouldn't recognise my old fan.

    The only reason you'd need anything more is if you're an overclocker, and overclockers are stupid. Only a moron would destroy their CPU's stability in return for a tiny gain that isn't even detectable to humans.

  • my phase change (Score:4, Informative)

    by LordMyren ( 15499 ) on Sunday March 06, 2005 @10:22PM (#11862334) Homepage
    i have a phase change water cooling system designed for photo baths. its got a huge insulted resivour and a heat exchanger.

    i had to axe the program after our house electricity bill kept climbing, sans the project even getting off the ground.

    phase change is one of the most expensive prospects out there. sure its badass cool, but you might as well spend the money on a faster chip and not have to pay again and again for your speed (in electricity bills).

    phase change has one and only one use as far as I can see (well, aside from those of us without metered electricity). i think phase change would rule in an office environment.

    as cpu's keep getting hotter, we're going to have to water cool. centralized phase change computer cooling begins to make sense.

    i dream of working in a office with no white noise. water cooling seems like a fine first step for doing so. of course, we'd have to use those silly projection keyboard things, quieter AC systems and do half a million other things to keep noise down, but most office i've been to, computer noise is one of the largest factors.

    Myren
    • Sure. We could all have big, fast, and noisy computer sitting on each desk and have to invest in special cooling equipment. Or we could use thin clients [ltsp.org]. Put some big beefy computers in a seperate room, cool them with a seperate AC system, and put small quiet computers on everyone's desks. Very few people use their big CPUs 100% of the time, mostly on in bursts, so an office can get away with having perhaps only 10-20% of the previous CPU power in its centralized servers. It's a shame that the MS-centric me

    • For most office uses, current new computers are way overpowered. Simply underclock them and do without cooling.

    • phase change has one and only one use as far as I can see

      Yes, the rankine cycle in power plant systems. I dont know what you are talking about with this silent office crap.

  • Peltier and high-end air cooling (Score:3, Informative)

    by mparaz ( 31980 ) on Sunday March 06, 2005 @10:34PM (#11862376) Homepage
    No one has mentioned Peltier cooling [arstechnica.com] yet? It looks like that works on the same principles.

    For the rest of us with hot CPUs or want silence... there's the Thermalright SI-97 [pimp-my-rig.com] for Socket A (AMD) boards, and Thermalright XP-90 [paraz.com] for sockets 478/775 (Intel) and 754/939 (AMD).

    • No one has mentioned Peltier cooling yet? It looks like that works on the same principles.

      Completely different mechanism. A phase change is simpler, ice->water or water->steam are a couple of obvious ones.

      Does anyone know of any solid state phase change coolers out there - that would be interesting news. Something like an alloy that melts at CPU temperatures (eg. woods metal = tin,lead,bismuth,cadmium I think) would work too but would be difficult to keep from running out and shorting things out -

    • Neither of the two Thermalright coolers you (brokenly) linked to are peltiers. They're just massive surface area heat-sinks with heatpipes and fan mounts.

      Thermaltake makes a peltier cooler. I tried it when I first built my P4 system about 18 months ago. It was abysmal. The controller would let the CPU run up to almost the published thermal limit (65C+) and then kick into high-gear. The fans ramped up to an unacceptable noise level and the peltier started making this loud click-click-click sound.

      Granted,

    • Have actually read the articles ? How exactly do phase change and peltier coolers work similarly ?

      The only similarity there is that they both use electric current. Do you think that's enough similarity to say that they work on the same principles ?

      Or perhaps I missed the point that both were invented in the 19th century ?

      The peltier effect is simply heat transfer between two conductors with different electron densities. That's the whole catch, actually: the flow of electrons generates energy. One side ge
  • Jeez, some people have WAY too much money on hand. You could buy a small freezer for a lot less than $700. Just put your entire PC case in it, route the cables outside and there you go, phase change cooling system for a lot less (tm).

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