Intel TEC sub ambient cooler

Asm0deus

EK®, the leading computer cooling solutions provider, announces the release of its EK-QuantumX Delta TEC water block. With more than 15 years of experience as a leader in premium quality cooling solutions, EK, in collaboration with Intel®, has developed a next-level solution for enthusiasts seeking consistent thermal performance and enhanced overclocking on unlocked 10th Gen Intel Core™ desktop processors.

https://www.ekwb.com/news/quantumx-delta-tec-water-block-featuring-intel-cryo-cooling/

https://www.ekwb.com/shop/ek-quantumx-delta-tec

Does anyone think ThermoElectric Coolers will make a comeback so to speak?

Vrika

Asm0deus said:

Does anyone think ThermoElectric Coolers will make a comeback so to speak?

No. That cooler costs €364 and draws up to 200W of power, and it can't even cool your CPU alone it needs to be coupled with a liquid cooler. Additionally there's risk of moisture condensating on your CPU when you cool it below ambient temperature levels.

There will be some overclockers who want to buy that as their hobby, but a thermoelectric cooler is only for someone's computer hardware hobby. For everyone else it's inferior tech compared to both air cooling and liquid cooling.

Asm0deus

Indeed I agree with most of your points however it seems intel is saying they have the condensation thing under control due to how it works with the controller which has an auto function to keep this from reaching the dew point or whatnot.

I find this kind of tech very interesting whether it become mainstream or not though as it's kind of cool..lol

I just wonder if it's worth it for Intel to put money into developing this kind of tech.....hmm

Quizzical

It's a science demonstration, not something suitable for everyday use.  Even if you want sub-ambient cooling, why would you use a Peltier effect cooler over a more straightforward water chiller?  That's the price neighborhood that you're looking at, after all.

It also comes with a high end price tag while being only compatible with one CPU socket.  And that one socket isn't compatible with any modern, high end CPU.  That makes no sense at all.

If you want to rely on software to track temperatures and humidity to keep everything above the dew point, then do it with a water chiller, not a Peltier effect cooler.  Even so, you're likely to be disappointed in the cooling performance when you realize that even at only 50% relative humidity, the gap between the ambient temperature and the dew point is only about 10 C.

Quizzical

Sub-ambient cooling is really only for extreme overclocking or for running hardware in extreme environments where the ambient temperature is very high.  If the ambient temperature where the hardware needs to run is 60 C, your Noctua cooler might not keep the hardware adequately cooled.

Quizzical

Torval said:

Agreed, when it is 30C in the summer my rig runs a bit hotter.

For the money it seems like investing in better A/C for room temp and humidity control makes more sense overall because it benefits all equipment and not just that one Intel box.

You're thinking of consumer use.  I'm thinking of militaries fighting wars outdoors in a hot desert, or data centers with a room full of hardware collectively cranking out heat in the megawatts range.  Or if you really want an extreme situation, I'm not sure exactly how they'll cool the computer equipment on the Parker Solar Probe when it comes within 4.3 million miles of the Sun, but I'd bet that air coolers don't work so well without air.

Quizzical

Torval said:

Fair enough. I was just thinking within the context of the OP targeting HEDT users. "...has developed a next-level solution for enthusiasts seeking consistent thermal performance and enhanced overclocking on unlocked 10th Gen Intel Core™ desktop processors"

This isn't for HEDT.  This is for Comet Lake, which isn't an HEDT part.  It would be much harder to make something like this work on HEDT systems.

One of the problems with Peltier effect coolers is that they don't just move heat, but also generate a lot of it.  To make up some numbers, it might pull 200 W off of the CPU, but generate another 200 W in the process.  Now instead of pulling 200 W off of the CPU, you need to pull 400 W off of the top of the Peltier effect cooler.

Water chillers also generate a lot of heat in the process of cooling the water.  But a water chiller can generate that heat over however large of an area it needs, and outside of the case entirely, so it's well away from the hardware that needs to be cooled.  A Peltier effect generates all of that heat right next to whatever it is that you're trying to cool.

For those who are confused about what I mean by a "water chiller", it basically means that you take a liquid cooling setup, give it longer water tubes so that the radiator can be further away from the CPU, and put the radiator inside of a refrigerator.  It's generally a more cohesive unit than you'd get from literally taking a mini fridge and drilling holes in it for water tubes, but it works about the same way.

Between refrigerators, freezers, and air conditioners, sub-ambient cooling is a major part of everyday life for much of the world.  There are sound reasons why those all work about the same way as each other, and not at all similar to a Peltier effect cooler.

Ridelynn

The way it was best explained to me:

Peltier cooler will consumer XX number of watts to generate a difference in temperature. One side will be hot, the other side will be cool. So you have the number of watts from your CPU (or whatever you are cooling), plus the watts from the cooler itself.

If you can keep the hot side cool enough, the cool side can run sub-ambient. But if you don't, it can actually run hotter than ambient.

A typical peltier for a PC application might be 1.5"x1.5" in size, and about 1/8" thick. It will consume around 100W, and generate a 80F difference in temp. So however cool you can keep the hot side, the cold side will be 80F lower than that.

Now you have a CPU pushing heat into that cold side, so there's a lot of thermodynamic equations there to figure out your final temps - that doesn't mean that your CPU is going to run 80F lower as well, because it's a heat source in and of itself. It's entirely possible on an undersized or undercooled peliter to actually have worse performance than an air cooler would have been in the first place.

They do ok for steady state applications. They totally suck for PCs anymore, where you have very dynamic power states and the heat load swings by a lot depending on what's running - that could cause your peltier to go from sub-freezing to pretty dang hot in a hurry.

But if your doing a no-power-saving no-holds-barred attempt at overclocking, or using one to sub-cool a custom liquid loop (as opposed to directly cooling a chip) - there are some applications there that make them worthwhile to consider. For 95% of the applications though - a standard compressor based cooling method is going to be better.

You do see a lot of peltiers in small refrigerators and beverage coolers - mainly the ones that are used in automotives and the like, or the little USB-powered coffee cup warmers.

Asm0deus

Did you guys watch the video?  

Not arguing here saying this will ever become mainstream but it uses water cooling along with it and seemed to be doing pretty well for benchmarking and it was tested during gaming which it seemed to be working pretty good too.

That said even if this was viable the pricing would just kill it, it's interesting nonetheless.

From what I saw on heavy load it was doing good of keeping the heat down and once that load was reduced it went down really fast to idle temps.

I will be staying with my NH D14 cooler however on my ryzen build obviously.

Quizzical

I'm not often going to watch a 24 minute video just because someone links it.

The problem isn't that it doesn't work.  Rather, the problem is that at that price:
1)  it needs to work a lot better than even a high end air or liquid cooler
2)  it needs to beat what you can do with a comparably priced water chiller
3)  it needs to work with high end CPUs in order to have a point at all

And with the launch of Zen 3, high end CPUs necessarily means not socket LGA1200, which is the only socket it is compatible with.  So it completely fails (3), and I'm also skeptical on (2).

Ridelynn

As a general rule I don’t watch hardware videos.