Fine, let's expect that the new tech doubles the efficiency, to 7%. Still, to my mind, pretty wasteful, on par with a steam railway engine. A Peltier element is good in cases where you can afford a large heat removal device, but need precise temperature control and no moving parts. For a home fridge, I'll take the sound of the compressor and the temperature fluctuations of a 400% efficient compressor-based heat pump over a Peltier element any day.
- energy source is solar, DC already and abundant.
- cold climate so the fridge can contribute to heating the room
Anyway good to know those small electric cooler with Peltier effect must be consuming a lot electricity.
No, they don't. First, without defining a delta T, efficiency is meaningless (unless its a Carnot cycle).
Second, the efficiency is (depending on op. point) higher than 100%. See [1]. You can pump 20 W of thermal power with 2 A @ 4 V = 8 W
20 W of cooling for 8 W of work, or an efficiency of > 200%. This is common to all refrigeration cycles, and frankly for a puny 10C, it sucks.
[1] https://www.datasheethub.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/data...
Still a bit far from compressor-based designs, but not negligible, and almost doubling the efficiency is indeed a serious advance.
These wide swings annoy me. You hear that you shouldn't let your fridge go above 4°C, because that's dangerous. And you obviously don't want your fridge to go below 0°C. But finding a setting where the hottest part of the fridge doesn't go above 4°C (or even 5°C or 6°C) during the hottest part of the cycle and the coldest part of the fridge doesn't go near 0°C during the coldest part of the cycle is really pretty difficult, in my experience.
Really? My fridge says 8°C, I think?
Christ.
I also run my fridge at 8C, which I think was the default setting when I bought it.
Gonna go change that right now.
(I always remember the recommended fridge temperature as 40F, which avoids the confusion.)
8C is a perfectly fine temperature for a wine fridge. And they usually have thermostats because a wine fridge is a luxury item. As opposed to keeping people from getting foodborne illness.
Be careful what you wish for.
When buying my current fridge, I specifically tried to go out of my way to avoid complexity, but the opening for my fridge is an odd size so my choices were limited. The only fridge I could buy that didn’t have a bunch of crap that’s was guaranteed to break (ice maker, water dispenser [seriously? aren’t most fridges right next to a faucet?], LCD-covered glass panel, etc) that also had a thermostat had a digitally-controlled thermostat. No knob or physical buttons, just a capacitive surface for temperature adjustment and some LCD screens showing the fridge and freezer set temps. (Not the actual measured temps, that would be too useful, just the set temps.)
In hindsight, I probably should’ve just gotten one with a regular dial, but I was a bit fixated on the “real” thermostat. So now I’ve got that to look forward to breaking in 4-5 years and figuring out where the hell to source a discontinued fridge LCD panel from.
Same reason you'd keep a container of filtered water in your fridge.
Maybe if I was on a well I would need to filter my own water, but then I definitely wouldn’t trust that job to a fridge.
There's going to be a temperature gradient in a typical fridge, if only because one side is getting opened every now and then, and the other is separated by all the products which are inside.
I suppose what they're trying to do here is even out that gradient without running the compressor.
I have always had my fridge at 8°C and never had something dangerous happen to me. I have never come across fridges that were way cooler, apart from fridges of friends in Canada and the US. What's the reasoning?
Even if your products generally meet their "should be safe at least until" date (Mindesthaltbarkeitsdatum, idk if it's the same as "best before"), you might exceed that longevity more often than you do now and thus have less food waste by setting the fridge colder - if food waste is a thing you have in the first place (I'm the type of person that is hungry all the time, opens the fridge when hungry, and isn't super selective (among what I've bought anyway), so food I buy ~always gets eaten before it spoils, but then when I see food waste numbers, apparently that's not the case for everyone so I'm just throwing this out there)
Edit: trying to fact-check myself, I can't find any trustworthy source in Dutch saying your foodstuffs fridge should be more than 4°C. I measure new fridges when moving in and again at least once during the first summer to make sure they stay at or below 7°C when we had the door open a normal amount of times, so I know they're that (and not much cooler, to not freeze items or waste energy). So far, products meet their minimum shelf life date thingy and almost always exceed it. Strange. Maybe this recommendation I heard predates the internet (showing my age here), or maybe every page on the internet assumes that nobody actually measures it properly and so they recommend a value that's half of what's actually safe?
My refrigerator is typically between 3-4°C, never had any problems with things freezing.
Ours (well, our landlord's) runs very consistently for 40 +/- 3 minutes, with just over 1h30min in between during normal use, or 1h54min if it was closed the whole time (like at night). The temperature of products, as measured with a cheap infrared thermometer that's probably off like 10%, varies between 2 and 7 degrees, but it's not very consistent between shelves (top seems warmer but then the very bottom one, that is only half deep, is as warm as the top again). The products I checked have all been in there for days; reflectivity may be part of the difference, not sure. I don't know what the air temperature difference is at the beginning and end of a cooling cycle though
I can't tell you how long it runs for because the compressor is too quiet for me to hear, sorry. Maybe if I had an energy monitor on it. Sounds like a fun idea.
The Mindesthaltbarkeitsdatum is the deadline to which the item may still be sold by the vendor, iirc.
The foodstuff itself is loaded with water, it won't have an excursion dangerously above 4C just because you opened the door and the air temperature raised a few degrees.
If you are really worried about it (you shouldn't), and you don't keep your refrigerator full, add a few water bottles for thermal mass.
Dangerous how?
Compressor systems use twice as much energy as an ideal system, while Peltier systems use about 10x as much.
I'd choose a fridge with a larger compressor.
- We don't have a strong physical theory for solid state physics. Quantum stuff doesn't scale well from 1 atom to a mole of atoms, because 10^23 goes into the exponent of number of energy levels in the system, and then we also have to model interaction of those levels.
- Physical properties of materials depend on their crystal structure, unevenness of that structure, spectrum of size of crystals, temperature, pressure, fields they're exposed to and current position of stars in the sky. Even the "wrong" solid state physics equations we have are highly non-linear.
- State-of-the-art effects are usually achieved with combinations of such materials.
- Exact parameters of the process used to put those materials together radically change the behavior of the system. Put that nanolayer with a different sort of vapor deposition or at different pressure, and the thing will stop working. Ever wondered why we don't produce all the neodymium magnets at N55 grade? Because even precise description of the process is not enough.
- AI doesn't care about the exact physics, but is sometimes very good at navigating in the large parameter space.
- Google have recently made AI that predicted thousands of novel material structures. They found more materials than were found by all human research over the whole humankind history.
I wouldn't expect AI to explain what's going on in solid-state physics anytime soon, but exploring crystal structures, doping, and process parameters automatically might actually get us new materials a couple hundred years faster.
“You are a refrigerator, examine this photo of the temperature reading and decide (y/n) if the compressor should turn on”
My point being that at least from an energy and carbon perspective, lowering the space cooling demand via more effective building envelopes or increasing the space cooling supply efficiency - eg via membrane or dessicant dehumidification, better heat pumps etc) is far more impactful on a macro scale than better refrigeration.
Granted refrigeration in a warehouse eg is really also space cooling, but I’m just making the distinction between the dT=0-25F context and the dT>25F context. If I could only choose one technology to arrive at scale to improve the efficiency, it would be for the former context.
The difference is in the thermal mass of the building and the surface area exposed to the sun.
The insulation is actually solvable, and for heating can basically remove the power requirements: a house heated and using heat exchange on air leaving vs entering can be heated a lot just by having people inside it, let alone the other energy they use for other purposes. It's just more expensive to build this way, and with cheap energy it can a long time to pay back. Cooling you can't push down past the heat generated inside the house divided by the COP of your cooler, though.
Anyways, if you write out all of the heat balance equations, you get a few W/m2 of flux on the inside wall of the home and a few W/m2 of flux on the inside faces of the fridge, assuming a typical wood frame construction in summer time and steady states all around.
So yes, of course multiplying the flux through the home’s wall by the surface area of the home results in a massive heat gain value compared to the heat gain conducted through the surface of the refrigerator, but that’s arguably precisely because of the two different volume requirements.
Do you need those things in a home refrigerator? I suspect not. But it might be handy for lab refrigerators.
You can buy R600a on Amazon right now. One $60 can will charge the system ~5 times.
Here's a video from someone who managed to salvage some of the components of such a system: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1tXIYl20jA
Cars already have heat scavenging that can move heat from where it's being created through losses to places where it's valuable, like the cabin or battery pre-heating. Especially in cold climates it feels like homes should be next.
In cars that have unified heat management the refrigerant cycle is handled as a separate element, with a manifold controlling individual coolant loops to each component. I'm picturing something similar for the home, with a coolant moving heat to and from each appliance using standardized communication to the manifold. There would probably need to be heat buffer tanks, but air to water heat pump systems for radiant heat already need this anyway.
For HP clothes dryers, there's no efficiency to steal from somewhere else, because they use both the hot and cold coils - similar to (the same, really) dehumidifiers.
The tradeoff would also be running high-pressure refrigerant lines everywhere. That would require EPA certification (in the US, anyway) to connect/disconnect an appliance, and it would probably be less reliable. These sealed-system units are generally pretty reliable, because the refrigerant is installed at the factory under ideal conditions, and there's no connections that are made later that may be done poorly.
I even ran some naive numbers on the amount of water that would condense in expected conditions, concluding it could be handy but I’d probably still need to source more water.
There were also centralised systems for apartments where one condensing unit supplied many evaporators in the refrigerator in each suite.
I think they're using different kinds of motor windings, bearings, insulation, etc. it's not related to the refrigerant or other system parameters. I've had older r600a fridges that were dead silent compared to anything sitting in a Best Buy showroom right now.
The advantage of the newer variable speed scroll compressors in some high end fridges is that they can run continuously at a slower speed.
I guess all of the places I've lived the kitchen was always its own room, maybe adjacent to the dining room if anything.
No new appliances (>10y now I think about it, they came with the house.)
I can barely hear it now.
It's not completely silent though, there's a small PC-like fan but it's way less loud than a compressor.
A hotel I was staying at had a small bar fridge that used a Peltier. I only know because it stopped working so I checked it and realized it was only a Peltier plus a heat exchanged (a cyclopropane loop).
I presume a full size fridge is outside of reach at this point.
At a reasonable delta T you can get 200% efficiencies.
A compressor based cooler gets a COP of about 4 in the real world. I'm pretty sure this is an apples to oranges comparison to an expert (I am not one of those) but a factor of 3+ increase in COP is fairly noteworthy -- if it holds up.
> is ~15 for temperature differentials of 1.3 °C.
I want to build a wine cooler in my basement ~20-24c, and I want it at ~16c. Is that low enough to be reasonably efficient?
They can be designed to move a specific amount of heat or to cool at some delta-T below the hot side (and due to inefficiencies the hot side can climb above ambient temperatures too, raising the “cold side” above ambient!)
I ran through a design exercise with a high quality TEC and at 8°C delta-T for a wine cooler you could expect a COP of around 3.5–4 (theoretically). This is pretty good! But below the 2.5V max to do that you’re only able to exhaust up to around 40W. For a wine cooler this is not so bad. For a refrigerator it’s a harder challenge because the temperature drops when the door opens, and if someone sticks in a pot of hot soup, it’s important to eject that heat before it raises the temperature inside to levels where food safety becomes a problem. For a CPU it’s basically untenable under load because it’s too much heat entering the cold side thus temperatures will rise.
https://fluffyandflakey.blog/2019/08/29/cooling-a-cpu-with-t...
Things often overlooked:
- Most TECs are cheap and small and come without data sheets, so people tend to become disillusioned after running them too hot.
- You have to keep the hot side cool or else the delta-T doesn’t help you. For a wine cooler this is probably no big deal: you can add a sizable fan and heat sink. For CPU cooling it becomes a tighter problem. You basically can’t win by mounting on the CPU; they are best at mediating two independent water-cooling loops.
- Q ratings are useless without performance graphs. It’s meaningless to talk about a “100W” TEC other than to estimate that it has a higher capacity than a “20W” TEC.
- Ratings and data sheets are hypothetical best cases. Reality constrains the efficiency through a thousand cuts.
When I think about TECs I think more about heat transfer than temperature drops. If you open a well-insulated wine cooler once a week then once it cools it will only need to maintain its temperature, and that requires very little heat movement. Since nothing inside is generating heat you basically have zero watts as a first-order approximation. For the same device mentioned above, it stops working below 1V, and at 8° delta-T that’s a drop in COP to around zero but it’s also nearly zero waste. If you were to maintain a constant 2.5V, however, it would continue to try and pull 40W to the hot side. This would cause the internal temperature to drop and your COP would decrease even though the TEC is using constant power. The delta-T would in fact increase until the inefficiencies match the heat transfer and everything stabilizes. In this case that’s around a 20° drop from the hot side, assuming perfect insulation.
Unlike compressors, TECs have this convenient ability to scale up and down and maintain consistent temperatures; they just can’t respond quickly and dump a ton of heat in the same way.
edit: formatting of list
It's like trying to swim against the current - the faster the river flows, the harder it is to move forward at the same rate.
Might as well not use a refrigerator if your ambient temperature is that low.
One side would have been ~23C and the other 24.3C.
Stacking a bunch of these Peltiers to give more temperature difference would give a pretty low CoP. Say, for a 13°C temperature difference you'd have to stack 10 of them and use 10x the power. It's even worse actually as the hotter ones have to also pump the waste heat from the cooler ones.
The design ΔT of ~10°C is the typical return-to-supply air ΔT.
Just an idea of course, but I'd not write new tech off as "ok but just 1.3 degrees who cares" when the claimed COP is so insanely good without first trying it out
A brick wall is on the heavy side and you'd be able to store a whopping 1/8 of a ton of AC in ten feet of brick wall. It'd save about 0.1kWh of AC power use. A whole house will have many lengths of wall but also multiple tons of cooling requirements, so that doesn't help much. And how are you going to distribute those small temperature differences without wasting a ton of power?
And that's after you figure out how to trap a temperature difference in your walls for more than a day.
What they’ve done here is add a point of failure, use additional materials as well as a traditional heat pump, and called it “AI” and “eco friendly”.
Never have I seen more prime VC bait.
That said, 1.5C is tiny.
That is, if you want to chill your cabbage to 4.3 degrees C, your room temp should be not more than 5.6 degree C. Or... if it's 25 degrees outside, in an ideal case your cabbage is 23.7 degrees cool.
Btw, max theoretical COP increases rapidly as T'hot - T'cold shrinks to zero. Your practical AC or fridge delta T is much more than that, depending on the weather.
And you dont get to stack Peltiers to increase COP, only to increase delta T.
Still, Peltiers are super cool and I have some ideas for their use od they get slightly better. Advances are super welcome.
I didn't actually have a use for it. It was just neat that it actually worked.
I understand the basic physics of it perfectly well. It's just one of those things where you expect basic physics to be overwhelmed by friction or something.
The thinness of Peltier devices bothers me. Amazing temperature differences… without any room to insulate such!
Unusually effective heat insulation is exactly how they work. (This is tempered by eg radiative losses, so making them thicker doesn't work better.) placing poorer heat (vs electrical) insulators between peltier material is counterproductive, similar to using resistors to improve conduction between copper wires
Don't ask me for a better explanation :)
As to why COP or even Carnot efficiency hasn't been thrown out in favor of temp-difference independent efficiency metrics like exergy.
I can't tell you either
I haven't seen it in any physics thermodynamics book, and only mech eng. seem to know what it is, and then only in the US.
Faires (undergrad MIT Thermo book from the 50s) makes no mention of it as far as I can tell.
But that isn't a mathematical expression. At best, it would appear to be energy * maximum_Carnot_efficiency (for heat engines anyway)
But it seems not to be adding very much, since Carnot efficiency depends on delta_(T). The OPs point that exergy doesn't depend on T is tautological since T has already been accounted for by the Carnot expression.
If one makes the walls thick, then they end up with a hole for the Peltier device and somehow sandwich two heatsinks on the device while maintaining insulation around it.
Perhaps easier to deal with in CPU cooling and such since one side is simply smacked into the thing being cooled.
The direct-contact neck cooling plates are an absolute lifesaver. Keep the sun off the back of your neck and chill one of the best heat sink locations exposed on your clothed body.
When I looked a while ago there wasn't really a clear winner or high quality unit. There is the "Coolify" series that are much more expensive but still somewhat middling reviews overall.
I'd say they are super hot, but it depends from which side you look at it.
(This is an area which is really hard and details matter. Heat is basically impossible to measure directly, and the indirect measurements are fraught with peril. Getting it wrong was a large part of why people thought they had demonstrated cold fusion)
>A compressor based cooler gets a COP of about 4 in the real world.
Real life refrigeration usually isn't very interested in a difference of 1.3 C. The Carnot COP for this temperature drop near ambient conditions is, I believe, around 200. When you consider a cooling technology relative to the Carnot efficiency (or COP) you get a better idea of what the efficiency means in practice. For an AC unit blowing 10 C air on a 40 C day, the Carnot COP is about 10, while real units get less than half that. But I think that's still better than the Peltier effect getting less than 10% performance relative to Carnot limits.
It's full on clown world.
It's somehow worse than Blockchain ever was.
https://www.jhuapl.edu/news/news-releases/250521-apl-thermoe...
I don't understand how they could quote him saying: “This thin-film technology has the potential to grow from powering small-scale refrigeration systems to supporting large building HVAC applications, similar to the way lithium-ion batteries have been scaled to power devices as small as mobile phones and as large as electric vehicles,”
Then the entire article foregoes comparing their peltier device to traditional compressor based heat pumps.
75% gains off that seems impressive. Must be something really fancy - thinking of a heat sink just using better therm paste barely moves the needle
Come the fuck on.
> 'When _I_ use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean--neither more nor less.'
> 'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you CAN make words mean so many different things.'
> 'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master-- that's all.'
> Alice was too much puzzled to say anything, so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. 'They've a temper, some of them-- particularly verbs, they're the proudest--adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs--however, _I_ can manage the whole lot of them! Impenetrability! That's what _I_ say!'
> 'Would you tell me, please,' said Alice 'what that means?'
> 'Now you talk like a reasonable child,' said Humpty Dumpty, looking very much pleased. 'I meant by "impenetrability" that we've had enough of that subject, and it would be just as well if you'd mention what you mean to do next, as I suppose you don't mean to stop here all the rest of your life.'
> 'That's a great deal to make one word mean,' Alice said in a thoughtful tone.
If they don’t meet the minimum AI namedrop quota, Seocho Samsung HQ rejects the proposal.
CloudFridge.
Local Automated Refrigeration Devices Eat Rabbits.
LARDER.
Comestible distribution network.
Kubernetes is only hard because people make it hard and never bothered to understand the basics of their workload scheduler.
Kubernetes is NOT AI hype, it solves real problems for real people everywhere.
"Infrastructure projects" that are here to stay and only getting better: Linux, systemd, Postgres, Kubernetes etc...
Fixed.
What worries me far more is the lack of formalism around risk / boundary cases by undertrained teams using modern AI solutions.
Anyone building on top of a thing should either understand (a) how it’s built in detail or (b) its specifications and behavior in detail.
Most of these teams understand neither about LLMs.
That's where my 100x comes from, not from the dev effort but from the debugging of issues of an unknown black box.
Speaking of, what does it actually mean? That the cooker isn’t using a timer?
Do most of them run off weight + time + heat response logic?
If someone has a few exa-flops of compute handy, the sticker thing could do with some attention.
Well, and germs of course. Germs will cause an immune response, but that's probably not the kind of "boost" you are interested in.
As for AI, I guess it is sufficiently vague and also not a medical claim, so you can put it everywhere. But because it is just as vague for consumers, is it even worth something for marketing?
At least vitamin C is water soluble: your body will almost always just pee out any extra quick so it is very hard to overdose. Those who have a kidney problem should check with a doctor, for the rest of us massive doses just make our pee more expensive.
This is highly dependent on the population you're talking about. There are plenty of people around the world who don't have great nutrition and don't eat large amounts of fortified industrial food.
>for the rest of us massive doses just make our pee more expensive
The study I linked reported ridiculous doses of vitamin C "dramatically improved the clinical state and cardiovascular, pulmonary, hepatic and renal function" in ICU spesis patients. Like 200-400 grams of sodium ascorbate administered over 7 hours. The recommended daily nutritional consumption of vitamin C is around 80 milligrams.
There are other studies reporting other positive outcomes for large doses of vitamin C. This isn't a recommendation that you should take hundreds of grams every day yourself, but there is ample evidence in a clinical setting for "immune boosting" vitamin C in large doses. (and also criticisms of the daily value for being too low)
Someone dying of sepsis in an ICU though, there's a whole bunch of very clear signals whether something is meaningfully effective or not. What that result tells you is that megadoses of vitamin C are likely not bullshit and should continued to be studied in more and more difficult to detect cases.
What this tells me is that 1) because I know it's likely rather safe for me and 2) there's enough evidence to convince me it might help, I'll keep taking lots of vitamin C if I feel like I'm getting sick.
Counterpoint: fuck marketing.
Book can look at your search history youtube history, or reading history to have insight about your points of interest to create list of topics you like, then generate pages on the fly using LLM.
learn this way, and they are going to be at such a disadvantage to the people that do it the old fashioned way and dont take shortcuts.
The vast majority of humans are going to offload all their critical think skills to LLMs. I dont want to be friends with those people.
I want to start a blog about these people called "Artifically Intelligent"
That really limits the friendship selection pool :(.
[1] https://cool.culturalheritage.org/byorg/abbey/an/an21/an21-8...
Can it be made multi-layer?
And can two plys be glued back to back so both are trying to transfer heat from center outwards and act as an insulator?
As a heater in this case.
> Can it be made multi-layer?
Yes, but each layer adds inefficiency and it's own energy.
If I recall correctly I got the setup powered but stopped short of actually putting it on my CPU when I couldn't mount it all in a way that would let me contain the condensation with what I had.
Maybe it was pccooling or pccasemods dot com? There was a really strong community forum back then where it was all going down, people were nitrogen cooling their PCs, watercooling was a big deal, and CPU temps of 60c were considered unsustainable.
I still overclock my computers but usually my aim is a silent computer under 60% load, so my goals have changed. Peltiers are not something I see taking over PC cooling even now. You still need the same radiator capacity, the peltier just moves the heat away faster and can get below ambient temps at the CPU.
Peltier coolers are neat because they're very small and quiet - as opposed to vapor compression systems solutions. However, they are an order of magnitude less energy efficient.
Also Peltier coolers still have to obey the laws of thermodynamics, which means that to cool one side of the mechanism, you must heat the other side. In order to do any substantial cooling, you need a way to dispose of that heat on the other side. This usually involves the use of radiators and fans, which negate much of the size and noise benefits.
As a result, Peltier coolers are pretty niché. Your use case would have to require only a little bit of cooling. You'd have to need a form factor that cannot accomidate a vapor cooling solution. And you'd have to be willing to make the system very energy inefficient.
Unless you want to spend more energy that you remove in heat, stick with heat pumps and cooling towers.
COP = Coefficient Of Performance, BTW. (Heat out) / (power in).
I am no hardware guy and I remember there was a giant heatsink despite the constraints. It was some kind of photosensor + lamp if I remember correctly.
I think there was also some software logic to reduce water condensing at something too cool compared to the ambient temperature.
The question is: Are there large-scale applications?
Thermoelectric cooling is not very good and takes a lot of energy to do.
Peltier cooling could have a higher utility local maximum than currently used refrigerants.
Best regards,
AI
Ps.: AI
Maybe a "switch" for when things get advanced.
It's that kind of AI.
AI rebuttal about it not being AI
WarOnPrivacy•6mo ago
Not long after I bought mine, they disappeared from cooler offerings. I've wondered what became of the tech.
PaulHoule•6mo ago
rurban•6mo ago
I'd really like to try out these better peltiers, our current ones suck. And the fans to remove the heat are huge and loud.
PaulHoule•6mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetocaloric_effect
and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elastocaloric_materials
of course they also have the dew point problem, but so do ordinary refrigerators and freezers.
rurban•6mo ago
marcusb•6mo ago
gsf_emergency_2•6mo ago
https://youtu.be/qAZ-q3KmDHM
duskwuff•6mo ago
Remember that Peltier coolers don't make heat disappear - they just move it from one side of the cooler to the other, and produce a lot of additional waste heat in the process. There are better ways of transferring heat from a hot IC to a heat sink nowadays - like liquid cooling for really high-performance systems, or capillary-action heat pipes for more typical needs.
delusional•6mo ago
Peltiers were always a bad way to move the heat. What they offered was the ability to go below ambient, which at the time could improve overclocking. Peltiers of course lacked the capacity to actually take you there with any decent load, but in theory it could.
It never really made much sense for consumers, and once consumers realized that, the market went away.
electroglyph•6mo ago
s0rce•6mo ago
Aurornis•6mo ago
Modern performance CPUs have TDPs in the 100-200W range.
Peltier cooling generates a lot of additional heat. It doesn’t scale well to the higher loads. That’s why you don’t see them any more.
hypercube33•6mo ago
rcxdude•6mo ago
(You can see a demo here where LTT try it, and they, after dumping 500W into the cooler, can get the CPU to a vaguely reasonable temperature, until they actually load it up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWrqyQWfhrs)
burnt-resistor•6mo ago
mousethatroared•6mo ago