Thermoelectric Cooling is a Bad Idea

this right here is the phenomic hex 2.0 cpu cooler and if you were to look at the performance claims alone you'd be forgiven for thinking there's some kind of magic going on here since it seems to be able to cool much better than its relatively small size would suggest but unfortunately for perpetual motion machine makers and this cooler alike magic is not real and thermodynamics is what makes this product special is of course its use of a peltier or thermoelectric cooler which uses electricity to move heat from one side of the device down here or up there wherever it is to the other pretty cool but what's even cooler is this what alex is holding is two aquarium coolers using a similar technology which together should be able to provide 360 watts of cooling power so we're going to see how our two contraptions here manage against a 10 core overclocked processor in a new crazy cooling experiment series that we're calling bad cooling ideas yeah [Music] vincero watches is celebrating their five-year anniversary and everything on the website is on sale until august 18 2019. check them out at the link in the video description [Music] all right so tech cooling is pretty well established at this point but that doesn't prevent people from marketing it as basically magic check out this desktop cooler on kickstarter so the way apelche or tech works fundamentally is by having electrons in the form of dc current pass through two elements in one of the elements the electrons go from a low to a high energy state absorbing heat and in the other they go from a high to a low energy state releasing heat so you've got the cold side and the hot side with a maximum temperature difference of usually around 70 degrees celsius the cooling capabilities of a tech are directly proportional to the power consumption of the tech module so back to that kickstarter thing it's not magic at all and really annoyed me when i found it in my email so basically all it's doing is using the tech cooler to make the water in the back of it hotter so in the end instead of your room being cooler which like it does a bit you just end up with a container full of hot water it's branded as eco-friendly but it's using a tech cooler which are just not efficient at all so it's using heck tons of electricity and it costs 350 dollars and it can only cool 60 watts a similarly priced refrigerant based cooler has literally 50 times more cooling but it does have a bluetooth speaker which i don't think that's enough to save that my air conditioner doesn't have that so let's get this thing on the cpu wait a second they did what we tell everyone to do they just completely ripped off noctua's mounting mechanism it's completely identical oh yeah yeah i saw that uh it's not quite identical it's like a bit worse yeah the back plate is like an all-in-one instead of having separate ones for amd and intel but yeah it's pretty solid yeah good for them at least they got one thing right so now that we know tech cooling is not in fact magic let's investigate this cooler a little bit more closely so phononic is not actually the first to attempt to build a peltier into a cpu heatsink monsoon coolant and swift tech all did it way back in 2007. and there may even be earlier instances why didn't it catch on i don't know maybe it just wasn't mature enough so uh let's take a closer look at this more recent attempt here how does this go in it just sits there uh yeah you need to put the like that or it doesn't really go back together no that's stupid all right and then this goes here and just kind of really let's squeeze this together i spent a fair bit of time figuring out how to get it back together while you were gone yeah hey does that screw it all the way down yeah does that mean is that mounting pressure so right oh you put it on upside down now the good news is that our uh contact looks great between the heatsink and cpu oh yeah so you've got pre-testing done on an nhu 12 va right yep now to be clear this is a much larger heat sink with almost twice as many heat pipes but it's 50 bucks cheaper so these things got to find a way to be competitive yeah you've got a second power supply just for our heatsink here yeah so if you were installing this in a regular computer you would do this we are just using a second power supply so we can find out just how much power this thing is drawing because of course for a tech to work you do need a power source for the palchie module itself which in the case of this cooler is embedded in the base between the heatsink fins and heat pipes up here and then another piece of copper now theoretically the bottom of this thing should be quite chilly it's hard to feel it though i don't know right now it's only drawing four watts so it might need some input from the fan header to really turn on interesting i'm having fun are you guys having fun this is probably the coolest thing hey i love that merch product placement was that you or david i don't know is that just andy's water bottle oh it could be uh yeah andy just left his water bottle we all have the same water bottle so like so we're just doing the good old blender bmw seeing what the max temperature is at the end of it we're idling at around 30 low 30 maybe yeah cool 30 low to 30 min so what we're trying to beat is a maximum core temperature of 68 degrees and an overall average across all 10 cores of 64.9 okay you think we're gonna think we're gonna do it no oh oh wrong window active here we go how's our power driver over there three watts right now 14. 30 oh so it kicked in interesting so that's fairly sophisticated it keeps the tech idle unless there's an actual heat load which is really good because otherwise you would actually end up with your cpu reaching sub-ambient temperatures which could cause condensation and shorting yeah up to 40 watts 42 is the highest that i've seen one of my cores is at 65 already okay that's not too bad though okay we're almost done so our maximum core managed to reach 70 degrees we've got another one at 69 another one at 68 68 67 yeah i mean he's coming back with his trusty calculator but i think i've already determined that we're higher science says it's worse yep two and a half degrees worse yep bummer this situation could only get better though right should we turn on the overclock yes so one of the special things about techs is that from my understanding if you overwhelm them so you have like too much heat they actually eventually become an insulator i'm hoping that doesn't happen but uh what do our cpu temps look like now we're 104 right now 106. hey it's trying hard yeah i wonder how it's looking there um i don't know if this is accurate because i don't know if it's just bouncing around but that looks like 50 degrees on top of the cpu there oh we're at a hunt oh it's it's hit the thermal max i'm guessing that it's down clock now oh it hasn't yet yeah it's down clocking now everything's at like 110 degrees um fortunately we always had a backup plan just shutting it down [Music] okay so while we were removing this this is absolutely fascinating now what i was expecting was for all of our heat sinks and heat pipes over here to be cooling the hot side of the tech but alex pointed out that it actually works a little bit differently than that yeah it looks like this entire side is just working like a regular air cooler and whatever's left over after those heat pipes is then being cooled by the tech which is putting all that heat into the other side right so our tech is actually sitting in between two quad heat pipe single tower coolers so effectively this one is cooling the hot side of our tech and this one is just cooling the cpu directly with the cold side of the tech also cooling this plate from right here in the middle yeah i feel like they were just concerned that your average cpu would overwhelm the tech which makes sense because it's only 40 watts right and that would explain why it didn't just completely blow up yeah and movie magic everything is different so we have a whole water cooling loop just on the table here 360 rad costs about the same as our two peltier units it's already been pre-tested we have a new overclock that pushes this to its limits nice and it's all tested uh so that's the same price as this which means that these two have to keep up with that correct and like the rgb is included in the price so yeah the first thing i notice about these is that while they are fairly pre-done as a solution for the user um they don't have connectors on them beautiful okay snip me like my doctor did it okay we need we need to rethink this everyone's just shocked that doing things the correct way is easier i'm shocked yeah this is you know after the crap you gave me about my soldering that is really not a lot better yeah it's not heating up the way that i would like it to want some electrical tape yep i mean once you wrap it in enough electrical tape no one can tell you're soldering job okay in all seriousness though guys yes this is really jank and no neither alex nor i would ever deploy something like this in like a 24 7 application but this will run for quite literally five to ten minutes and we have a fire extinguisher right there okay wow that immediately got really cold wow eighteen fifteen thirteen eleven that's absolutely that's really cold we're gonna be below zero very soon uh yep we're below zero degrees so this could be a bad idea to keep my finger on here yeah what's it like on the bottom uh 60 60 70 something like that not bad it feels fine so guys what we're looking at here is a much more powerful peltier module you can see it has just larger gauge wires going into it it does seem to be a bit bigger than the one that was built into the heatsink and what it's doing is it's got its hot side over here which is being cooled by this double tower cooler with 392 millimeter fans and then it's got its cold side over here with just this rudimentary water block that is really quite frosty you can actually see there's frost forming on it and i'm leaving fingerprints behind so that's going to chill our water and this is going to dissipate the heat of our peltier module and our cpu to the surrounding air also it's currently drawing 301 watts not bad yeah instead of necessarily trying to have it at the highest point and like minimize water loss that way what if we just cut the tube and then i just jam this on there um this is a quick connection sure okay so actually oh pinch it pinch it wait wait wait wait don't don't lift that up not too high this is not half inch tubing okay okay let's keep that oh wow that is not coming off so here's an idea yeah should we just get this out of here um what's attached okay now that looked really jank but that's how much water we lost yeah we're basically pros but that was intentional so how proud are we right now we basically invented a cool it boreous not very now our idle temps are looking pretty fine 26 27 27. so actually it is lower now it's 23. oh wow actually it's dropping really fast yeah our lowest core is at 22 already all right f12 yep here it goes so we're looking at a maximum temperature of 84 to beat 80.7 is our average on all cores remember there's two chillers in series here so we want this one versus this one so this one's like 26. and this guy come on it's like it's like 26 also well it's trying they're trying there bud oh our render's done oh so our maximum on the hottest core was 80. however that doesn't tell the whole story because we actually started with our water chilled to sub-ambient and we could see as the test ran that it was definitely heating up so we need to do a longer test yeah so how'd we do oh yeah we had to beat 84 degrees and we hit what 94 that's so that's not great so all that's left after of course zipping up my stealth hoodie and telling you guys it's available on lttstore.com is to walk through why this is a bad idea so there's a couple of things number one it actually isn't any more compact even though the peltier module itself is quite small because you've got to cool all that extra heat number two is the extra heat and therefore noise number three is the cost for the same price we were able to get this radiator along with like rgb fans and stuff and number four is of course the power consumption this at full blast consumes about 10 watts while this consumes about 300 watts so the thing with tex is that yeah it's cool that you can reach sub-ambient temperatures as long as there's not much heat load but if as soon as you fire up something intensive like a render your temperatures go higher than just with a traditional water cooling radiator then that's kind of a bummer but guys make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss this video because that doesn't mean that peltiers are necessarily a bad idea the way that they were in this video now the way we used to do it in the old days was we'd take a peltier and put it directly between the cpu block and the cpu taking the cooling right where it's needed now the problem was that cpus outpaced peltiers in terms of how much heat they were outputting and what kind of peltiers you could get so it became just impractical but alex found oh yeah we found one that's 545 watts and draws 32 amps so that's on its way from ebay that's going to be a future video subscribe hit that bell so you don't miss it and we will see you there in maybe bad cooling ideas episode two yeah that might be a good idea and maybe soon and maybe not because ebay shipping speaking of ebay shipping i'm bringing this sponsor segway right to you right now faster than ebay shipping this video is brought to you by if you want to protect yourself online and browse anonymously with a hidden ip address private internet access is an affordable way to do just that pia makes a website think that you're in a different location and it's got a ton of features including offering 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Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 2,594,520

Keywords: TEC, Peltier, CPU cooling, computer cooling, overclocking

Id: IX2NQ1lq4ZM

Length: 17min 55sec (1075 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 11 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/DZCreeper]

TL;DW - Known Peltier problem is that they consume a lot of power themselves in order to achieve a temperature delta. Barely able to match a 360mm AIO with that two unit configuration.

Could probably extract another 10-15c of improvement by using finned copper blocks instead of aluminium blocks, that still leaves you with a mediocre cooling solution that consumes 300+ watts by itself.

[u/bigwrm01]

Back in the early 2000's I had a Prescott CPU with a TDP of 95 watts(during overclocking was 135watts+). I ran a Koolance case that I added a second radiator to the rear. With a 260watt peltier on a separate power supply. I was below 0 before boot and at 36F under full load. I had an insulation kit from Mushkin. It was awesome, while it lasted. One day I heard beeping from my bedroom and when I got back there I could smell burning. The pump controller on the Koolance case had popped and the pump stopped. The motherboard failed to shutdown the computer after reaching max temp. I could see water boiling inside the block. I yanked the cord. It was months before I felt like tinkering with it but one day I ripped it apart and removed all the insulation. The wires fell out of the peltier like the solder no longer worked. I put the stock Intel Cooler on and bam, it booted like a champ. Nowhere near the overclock I had but I was surprised it even functioned.

[u/viperabyss]

I think LTT is about 10 years late to this realization. After the release of Coolermaster V10, it was pretty well known that thermoelectric cooling was extremely inefficient.

[u/Goober_94]

That is not how you use TEC's. You put the TEC directly on the CPU, and use a water loop to cool the TEC.