Thermoelectric Cooling is a Bad Idea 

“But what’s even cooler!” *gets ready for sponsor* “Are these coolers” Me: What?

Hey no fair! You did a Thermoelectric video too! Well at least they are a bit different!

Yeah ! More than half the power is wasted in Heat

I love that I'm seeing this right after Intel released their first consumer Thermoelectric cooler. The results are amazing, I can't even lie. Watched one on a 5950x all core 4.8ghz to 5ghz boost clock at 45 degrees C which is bloody insane.

"Bad Cooling Ideas" Whole Room Water-Cooling 2 confirmed.

Dad: What would you like for Christmas? Son: A Dragon! Dad: Be realistic. Son: Okay, how about part 2 of Linus Tech Tips 10 Years of Gaming PCs. Dad: And what color would you like that dragon?

Sounds like we're revisiting this from the "The Fastest Gaming PC in the World! ...For now" video.

people will see the decibels and think "wow its half as loud as a jet"

Edit: LMG, please read and try this Try running them as a supplement to the radiator! Connect them after the radiator to see if you can get an extra boost in cooling compared to a standard water cooling set up!!!

That was not fair, the traditional watercooling solution had RBG fans while the peltier on had non-RGB. Everybody knows that RGB boosts cooling up to 50%

I came here because of the new MYSTERY EK COOLER in the fastest pc in the world which is obviously a mix between a normal liquid cooler + a peltier cooler.

I had a friend in high school in 2001 who built a TEC for his Athlon XP system and made a water cooling system using a motorcycle radiator. This is old news to me and people keep trying it. I can't imagine trying to cool off a Pentium 4 system during that era with a TEC without breaking a kilowatt of energy.

Everyone gangsta till Linus finds a liquid nitrogen cooler

0:50 who else thought he was going to say "But what's even cooler, is today's video sponsor" lol

On my MacBook Pro laughing at Linus’ reaction to a 100°C+ core temp as I burn my nuts.

The Peltiers becoming an insulator is absolutely true. I bought 2 of them as a kid to cool a CPU and if the CPU gets too warm, they basically become heaters and the more power you dump into them, the more heat comes from both sides…

When your PC cooling requires it's own miniature power plant just to keep the CPU at sub ambient temps.

I think Der8auer build a chiller out of 12 TECs a few months ago

0:29 Alex smile priceless

I had an idea a few years ago, but have lacked the motivation to try it out. You keep the traditional water loop setup including rad, but insert a peltier device into the loop after the radiator. You have a thermocouple on the water block that is connected to the peltier and a humidity and temperature sensor measuring the ambient air hooked up to a micro-controller which controls the voltage applied across the peltier device. The micro-controller ensures that the temperature of your coolant never goes below dew-point, so you don't have to worry about condensation, and the peltier does not draw as much current. There is definitely some risk here of your radiator actually working in reverse and heating the coolant, depending on the thermal output of the system, but if you had a loop that cools not only your CPU, but also GPU and potentially MOBO chip-set (and maybe even RAM - because after all this is a crazy idea in from the get-go), I think there is little chance of the coolant reaching the rad at sub-ambient temperature.

32 amps... lmfao... "Ok alex, fire it up!" (kerchunk) (sudden random shouting throughout the offices as power breakers are tripped)

Linus going for the party in back look.

Who’s here after 2020 fastest gaming PC video ?

I had a CoolIt! cooler (whatever their higher end one was called) back in the day. The design was quite different from this; it was effectively an AiO cooler that had TECs between the loop and the radiator. Worked quite well for several years, up to the point that I ultimately had a pump failure.

"In this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics!"

6:49 wanna congratulate Linus on keeping that yawn back.

its crazy to see how far you guys have come in only 3 years. confidence and production value is exponentially higher

Back in the day Corsair made a TEC water block for ram which is actually practical as ram doesn't make enough heat to overwhelm the TEC but is temperature sensitive enough to benefit from superior cooling from a TEC.

4:01 *linus pretends to tighten screw while alex looks worried that screw is not tightening*

"Magic is not real." Says a man who was at some point in his life cursed to drop anything and everything.

Love watching you two work together- one of my favorite things abut this channel

0:50 "But what's even cooler, is..." Who else braced themselves for "OUR SPONSOR!!!" ??

Hey, So I have been messing around with TECs for the last 2 months in my spare time and I have found that "overclocking" (overvolting) the Laird Thermal Systems ET15,24,F2,5252,TA,RT,W6 which is purchasable on digikey for about 60 CAD to around 46v which I found was best for directly cooling a cpu. The power consumption was nearing 900w but with 2 360mm radiators and the water temperature around 30C, I was able to cool i7 940 (yeah I not gonna use this on anything too new) at 4.4ghz at 1.43v while remaining sub ambient. I have already built a few peltier prototypes and I live in Coquitlam, BC so if you would like I can bring them if you would like to explore TECs further because its actually pretty fun for a silent subzero fun time.

Bad Cooling Ideas : Using a sterling engine hooked up to a motor to pump the heat out of the CPU.

Hey can you test the cooling performance of the radiator by itself, against the radiator PLUS one of the chiller elements in the same loop? I think thermoelectric cooling may be a better assistant than the sole cooling power

"Draws 32 amps" "From Ebay" Sounds...safe...

The most badass CPU cooling system I ever saw was a copper pipe welded to a copper plate, insulated with foam, and filled with liquid nitrogen, for the ultimate ridiculawesome evaporative cooler of all time.

If you use a 300W peltier on a 100W cpu now you have to dissipate 400W. That's why it will always be unpractical.

Cooler Master V10 Air CPU Cooler had a peltier supporting the otherwise MASSIVE cooler . Cant remember when it was first launched BUT 2008-2009 would be my throw at it.

I have to wonder if splitting the hot, out-loop, and sending equal amounts of water to both coolers wouldn't have worked much better. It would slow the water down while inside the cooler, allowing more heat rejection. Then combine the Peltier water outlets to send a single loop back to the CPU.

Bad Cooling Idea: Custom Watercooler filled with thermal paste.

Next, try a TEC and a radiator in series, because science.

Thanks for making a video of this. I've been wondering about it for more than a year.

I remember seeing my first (and last) Peltier CPU cooler in the Pentium Pro days, which would be late 1995 to 1996... There was concerns and issues with condensation back then, as there was no regulation of the Peltier cooler, so it always ran at full blast, potentially getting cold enough to condense water from the air...right on top your CPU.

....jesus. That Peltier you ordered draws more power than my entire machine. And, I run an overclocked Vega64. Thefuck.

Jeez I remember peltier coolers back pre 2000 to allow CPU overclocking to 200MHz+ :)

I love this section of LTT! Alex should do more weird cooling ideas ! :D Amazing! keep it up Alex! How about; multiple fridges, how much fridge do you need to cool a CPU on full load? :D

people were trying to use Peltier heat pumps 20 years ago for PC cooling. It didnt take off then either.

It's just as dumb as gold plated fiber optic cables Cough, looking at you, toslink cables

Vincero watches put commodity Quartz movements that cost single digit dollar amounts in cases that cost not much more, and then they sell the watch for $100s

I would love to see a project where you have an array of Tec coolers cooled on both sides by two large water blocks, where the cooling capacity is greater than the max power consumption of the cpu & gpu. You have the hot side a water loop to dump heat to probably 3 rads each with 3 120mm fans. Then the chilled side, a water loop to your cpu & gpu. It seems key to me to have the TEC coolers controlled by an arduino, that is monitoring the discharge cold water temp from the TEC, and comparing it to the local dew point inside the case, cutting power to the TECs when you’re within 2 degrees of the dew point. It would probably be a good idea to have thermal mass in the cold water loop, for when cpu and gpu ramp up and down. Maybe an insulated LTT tech bottle? Probs wouldn’t hurt on the hot side, but not entirely necessary. Little things I would then geek out on are the cpu and gpu being piped in parallel on the chilled water loop, with balance valve so you could divert flow for optimum temps between the two. I’d prob have all the hot flow go through 1 rad first (as it would be at high temp and thus dump heat quickly with the air), and then the second rads in parallel, running at lower temps but having a lot of air to approach ambient. Maybe experimenting with arrangements here would be fun. But the key part of it all is that arduino monitoring chilled water temps, as to not have condensation on the cpu or gpu. Which I think is one of the main faults with the coolers shown in this video, second only to their cooling capacity being much lower than the max power consumption (thus heating capacity) of the cpu.

Stock up those Peltier resistors, use about 5 one on to of each other, parallel connect them, such set up of dozens is used to create true cryo temperatures

I worked in a lab for two summers working on thermoelectric materials with heating and cooling. I am currently sitting here cringing through the entire video.

I successfully used an 80-watt peltier on my PC back before you guys were begging for happy meals. I inserted it between the CPU and the heatsink, and used lots of silver-based thermal goop. With the exact same fan speed settings, I was able to drop the core temps by 6 degrees C, and thus achieve a 67% overclock, compared to a 50% overclock. That meant I saved about $1,000 on the CPU. So the extra power wasn't really an issue. More recently, I designed and built a Peltier-based stove fan for atop our fire. It uses an alloy base to absorb the heat, and a massive old Coolermaster heatsink with 6 heatpipes. The temperature differential drives a 12" RC plane propellor which blows air over the heatsink, and maintains a 40-50 degree C difference between the two sides of the peltier. This generates 1.3 volts, and enough current to drive the propellor sufficiently quickly to remove a huge amount of heat from the flue. To avoid heat-soak, the device has to sit perched right at the front of the fire, so that cool air from in front of the fire can be pulled in to cool the heatsink. The thing is so well made, that it starts automatically when you light the fire, and it runs until the firebox cools to the point you can just touch it.

16:15 oh goodness my man was just waiting for his moment to talk so awkwardly 😂😂😂

Ok, Linus and ElectroBoom both have a thermoelectric cooling video out within 24 hours of each other. Strange...

Naw, it's awesome! I remember when people TEC cooled Celeron 400s...

6:50 Linus did a good job hiding a yawn lol

Great audio in your vids. Thumbs up to your recordist 👍

Linus "Thermoelectric cooling is a bad idea" Also Linus "Cooling with concrete kinda works!"

16:29 *drops bench* His face: That was worse than expected, hopefully linus doesn´t...

peltier chips are good for one things: using a joule thief circuit along with it you can make diy flashlights that are powered by your body warmth. power input creates temperature output and vice versa.

I always wanted the ultra thermal electric cooling one back in the day. I thought it looked really cool

"Maybe it just wasn't mature enough." Alex: *chuckle, look of disbelief*

At least you can use this to get free water from air. Oh wait...

My first from-scratch build in 2000 used dual celerons cooled by peltiers. But of course, a celeron 366 didn't put out that much heat, even when overclocked to 600. It worked well, but I did kill a few power supplies over a few years.

2 questions. Does anyone know what type of laptop Alex is using, and does anyone know the specs of the rig they are testing the cooler on?

"My air conditioner doesn't have [a bluetooth speaker]..." MY air conditioner doesn't have an AIR CONDITIONER.

I saw the title on my Firefox notification and I was like "this sounds like a Linus video. and that other guy who fiddles with electrical stuff". Been a while since we've seen Alex haha

I had a Titan Amanda TEC cooler back in the Core 2 Duo days and it worked pretty well, was just quite power hungry.

In a sound studio, you can't use either traditional watercooling or fans because of the noise they make. So if you don't have the option of doing your cooling in a different room, then using peltier modules can be a good idea. You could put lots of peltier modules on the outside of the chassis to silently pump heat out of the system and in that way improve the efficiency of the CPU cooler. Come to think of it, I think that could also be used to bring the system down to very low temperatures, since the condensation would gather on the outside of your chassis and away from any electronics.

I remember to have done the calculations for Peltier cooling on the late 90's or early 2000's and the numbers get really fastly big. When you use a peltier, you want: 1°) deltaT (hot temp - cold temp) as big as possible. 2°) hot side (and so cold side) as cold as possible. Then comes the problems: A peltier element can achieve his maximum deltaT when the heat input in 0w. When the eat input match the peltier maximum power, the deltaT become 0°C. It means that a peltier has to be much powerfull than a CPU if we want it to be well-cooled. So for example a 25W AMD K6-2 from this old times, to be quite well cooled, you need a 80W+ peltier. A 80W peltier means 80W power absorption capacity. And so 80W+ power consumption and eat generation. So the cooling system have to be big enough to evacuate 25 + 80+ = 105+W heat instead of the 25W from the CPU alone. Also sometimes, a peltier fries. So he become a powerful heat generator, leading to to the CPU to follow it in his death.

The logic of this sounds like... "Let's cool all them watts, by adding MORE watts!"

I used to work at a lab where we used Peltier coolers to chill the CCDs. We did get the condensation problem once, which resulted in some confusion looking at images till someone worked it out XD (they're supposed to be sealed units so water really shouldn't be able to get in there, but of course, it still happens sometimes :P)

Alex's facial expressions at the start were hilarious.

Very informative video. I had no idea what a TEC was until today. Thanks for the great video as always! 👍

Cooler Master V10 had one too! i had a q6600 cranked to the max with one of them and it ran SWEET

At my previous job we built a railway inspection system with two high-end pcs in a box with water cooling, where the water was running through an industrial chiller. (The chiller was cooling multiple water streams, pcs, cameras, and LED lights) Try that! :D

Who came here after 5.7Ghz 10900k?

Ask Der8auer. He has a Peltier cooler that works great. It just needs a lotta power.

Linus: but what’s even cooler Me: Skips 20 seconds Also me: shit

Cool fact: some dehumidifiers use peltier modules to dehumidify rooms as the warm humid air is drawn pass the cool fins the water is condensed and drips into a collecting tray in the bottom of the dehumidifier.

😂 This was great fun to watch. Can't help but think that a PC with more CPUs with boring coolers for the same power draw would be a vetter way to get enhanced performance.

12:58 _Linus always has a simple solution to complete the loop in half the time. You only get that after years of experience, kids._

TECs can be great, when done properly.... Like with my 400w TEC getting an athlon Xp Barton to sub zero temps with a liquid system chilling the hot side. And a second psu dedicated to the tec. ....as you said "in the old days"

What program are you using to test that?

Can I get the peltier cooler to reach between 16f and 289f? I'm trying to cook or freeze something. What is the best one for what I'm asking for. I'm making a hot\cold plate, to cook or freeze

Put a tec inbetween a refrigerant phase change system block and the cpu. It doesnt really work, but thats sort of the point of these videos.

PLEASE stop working with vincero watches. There watches are cheap made and crappy. It's almost a scam for way they cost. Please stop Linus please.

if you were to use a standard radiator setup but use a peltier in series on the return to the cpu would it work better. like passing the pipe through a fridge after cooling

Back in the late 90's I had a peltier on my K6/2-500. I do not know who made it, but it was just attached to an aluminum heatsink, 60mm fan. I never had a single issue with it. Used it for about 3 years then gave it away. It came from a buddy who worked for a tiny town PC shop. The owner, in his 80's was 100% convinced that ALL limits had been hit, and wouldn't sell a high end PC without one. Then Slot1 came out. Someone asked me years later what I did about condensation. I told him I do the same people with a 100% acrylic case do about EMI. I don't think about it. Also bear in mind that my peltier was on a soc7, in a desktop case, no cover, extra PSU on top, 2 extra 5.25" drives, a stack of HD's, and a box fan bungied to it blowning down.

You want to know what draws more power than these coolers? All of these plugs for LTT merch.

The only thing that matters in a sustained workload is the surface area of the fin stack. It doesn't matter whether you move the heat with heat pipes, water or TECs.

I was researching peltier chips on CPUs and stumbled across an interesting comment (not sure if it was this video or another). Someone suggested using a peltier chip in conjunction with a water cooling system. Instead of applying the peltier to the CPU, you put it on the water reservoir to keep that cool. However, hearing about how peltiers use a lot of energy, I decided to look up ways to control the voltage to a peltier. Apparently, you can't regulate the voltage. But, you could turn it on and off with a PID controller. The PID would monitor the water in the reservoir to make sure it maintained a constant degree. If it went too high, the peltier would kick in and cool the water back down to the optimum temperature before getting turned off again.

Just curious, in keeping with the theme of bad cooling ideas, what would happen if you added the radiator to the loop after the CPU to bleed off some extra heat energy before the coolant circulates back to the TECs. This way you are reducing the pre-cooler fluid to as close to ambient temps as possible before the coolers do their work. I realize it costs twice as much and negates the comparison between the two, but it would be interesting to see just how cool you can get it by using TEC. It would be more like boosting an already capable system than trying to replace it altogether. Also curious what affect you would get from using the TECs in series vs parallel configurations, i.e., running the coolant through one, then the other vs splitting it into two parallel cooling paths then merging them back before they enter the CPU cooling block... you never know, maybe the slower coolant flow through the cooling blocks will allow for more heat energy to be removed from the coolant. Other tweaks, like insulating the cooling blocks and cold lines and having the coolers as short a distance from the CPU as possible might add a little efficiency as well.

Next project: Einstein-Szilard Refrigerator cooling. It would potentially be the ultimate quiet PC.

I remember seeing TEC coolers in computer magazines and catalogs back in 1998. They didn’t catch on due to condensation on the cold side. Given the control modern boards have, it would make more sense now though by the time it could have made sense CPUs started making so much heat that TECs couldn’t keep up.

Sir i want to use 4 [TEC 12715] peltier module from one Power supply each peltier module requires 12V 15A so which smps is suitable for sufficient power for all 4 pelter modules?

Would love to see you guys water cool with the radiator then put the chiller after that so your chilling close to room temp water

Used to TEC cool my Celeton 300A @ 600mhz, wayyy before 2007.