Unconventional TEC cooling

[ArcSmith]

I was wondering. Big air coolers like the noctua nh-d15 have a flat metal surface between the heatsink and the heatpipes touching the CPU. What if you were to put a tec cooler attached to a water cooling loop not in-between the cooler and CPU. But on top of that metal bit above the heat pipes. That way you could still get a boost of cooling when needed and if the tec failed it wouldn't matter because it would'nt be in between the noctua cooler and the processor. I've seen some pretty thin water blocks it there and wondered if this would be possible or would even make a difference.

[W-L]

On 6/8/2018 at 8:58 PM, ArcSmith said:

I was wondering. Big air coolers like the noctua nh-d15 have a flat metal surface between the heatsink and the heatpipes touching the CPU. What if you were to put a tec cooler attached to a water cooling loop not in-between the cooler and CPU. But on top of that metal bit above the heat pipes. That way you could still get a boost of cooling when needed and if the tec failed it wouldn't matter because it would'nt be in between the noctua cooler and the processor. I've seen some pretty thin water blocks it there and wondered if this would be possible or would even make a difference.

It's not very efficient TEC coolers use a lot of energy and still require heavy cooling on the hot side to function. You also need to regulate the peliter so it doesn't go sub ambient to prevent condensation or if it gets so cold the point of frosting over. As said the V10 is a good example of why we don't see many coolers with TEC enabled cooling where it was very inefficient for little performance gain. 

 

Most that want extreme cooling these days will go directly over to phase change type cooling solutions. 

[ArcSmith]

On 6/10/2018 at 12:58 AM, W-L said:

It's not very efficient TEC coolers use a lot of energy and still require heavy cooling on the hot side to function. You also need to regulate the peliter so it doesn't go sub ambient to prevent condensation or if it gets so cold the point of frosting over. As said the V10 is a good example of why we don't see many coolers with TEC enabled cooling where it was very inefficient for little performance gain. 

 

Most that want extreme cooling these days will go directly over to phase change type cooling solutions. 

So what if you instead had a cooling block that would cool that side with phase change cooling. That way you could get noctua levels of silence to performance ratios, as well as the option to cool down even further if you wanted without interfering with the noctua cooler. Is that possible?

[W-L]

6 minutes ago, ArcSmith said:

So what if you instead had a cooling block that would cool that side with phase change cooling. That way you could get noctua levels of silence to performance ratios, as well as the option to cool down even further if you wanted without interfering with the noctua cooler. Is that possible?

Why would you not directly use phase change on the die then, it would be the most effective way of cooling the CPU without some intermediary step.

[ArcSmith]

So that when you don't want the loud noise of a phase change cooler, you can just use the noctua cooler.

[W-L]

1 minute ago, ArcSmith said:

So that when you don't want the loud noise of a phase change cooler, you can just use the noctua cooler.

It would just be easier to have the system in another room or location at that point, with any extreme cooling solution it comes with certain caveats.