ANd here I thought that I had a unqie idea with a built in refergirator. Well eitherway, I'll let you in on a secret. Aircooling is all you need, and you can achive a temperature of 40 degrees (F) below room temperature. Have you ever seen one of the "travel coolers" that plugs into the lighter in your car? They use a fan with a extreamly high CFM (noisy too), and blow air over an aluminum heatsink, which is connected to an aluminum box, which is wrapped with foam for insulation. It does a rather good job of cooling, but you would need to make sure wherever your bringing your air in from, that it is outside the case, and you would more than likely want to, as I say" Thermally isolate" the box from the heat generated by the computer. I'm currently experinenting with a water cooled version of this, hoping to get it even cooler, but haven't gotten to much futher than buying some foam, 1/4" felxable water pipe (copper), and some other odds and ends. Still need to find a radiator, and a cheapo water pump (I'm thinking a simple drill attachment one?). I'll let you know how this works once I get it figured out, since this is the basis of my next case, well part of it, the other half, you'll just have to wait until my project log starts .
Yes I know those things. I've been planning to blow hot air straight out of the case, but there's some problems (I have no tools to cut metal too well...) And drill attachment pumps are NOT good.. They're noisy and unreliable.. I'd go for eheim..
The drill water pump was just to see what type of cooling I would get, and then once the case project started, invest in a high pressure/flow pump that would go with the case design. But a Peliter is a brilliant idea, and I didn't think about that. I'll have to look into that some more none the less, I think this could become the new trend!
It would more likely come new trend if it wouldn't need so much space.. Not every case has something like 30x20x20cm of free space 30x20x20 doesn't even yet include powersupply which is another problem. If one day peltiers will work at 12V, they'll become very popular....
Peltiers do work at 12V, from 60W to 200W, they all use the 12V rail, the higher power ones just use more amps.
They actually have peltiers under the ALU heatsinks. It isn't possible to cool something to below ambient just by blowing air (which is at ambient temperature) onto it. Also, 16v peltiers will work at 12v, just at a lower power (they won't transfer as much heat from the cold side to the hot side. Think of it like under-volting a fan. It still works, but not as powerfully. _C
Ofcourse they work but not nearly as powerfully as at full voltage. And in peltiers getting out all juice is IMHO quite nice, since half-power doesn't make any good they don't noice more etc...
Ahh. Home again. I bought some nice stuff from Helsinki Some stuff I bought: spiral wrap, microphonewire, headphonewire, RCA-connectors, cableties, NPN-transistors, PWM-ICs, op-amps and so on... Oh some fuseholders and rotaryswitches allso. I'm not yet sure which of all that will come to compaq, but atleast wires + connectors...
LOL! If it wouldn't be 2AM I'd shout my f'ckin ass off! I just get peltier down to -10Celcius! Which is my personal record ever. I made this by using ~15Vdc instead of lousy 12V which I used before. This is good, this is very good. I had problems with wires since I'm so tired... I forgot to connect PSU to inverted and I allready told my friend I'm gonna sell all my electronics and start playing CS lol that's worst thing I can say
Pics, pics, pics. So during this night I've modified 12->15-24V inverter and ran few tests with peltier setup. Finally I'm a bit satisfied with results. Let these pics and temps show the difference between 12 and 15Volts on peltier-use. In first pic you can see my test setup. 230W ATX-power, 12->15V inverter and 92mm fan cooling peltier-heatsink. It's basicly the same I used before, except this was first time with inverter. Inverter used to be some sort of laptop-power for car-use.. So it had connector to smokelighter. HAD.. I ripped old connector off and added normal molex. I allso added fuse. It's nicer to burn fuse than PSU. First voltage-measurement after modification. Relief were huge when I noticed it still works. And then tempreratures! Room temp were quite high during test session, as you can see in first pic. Heatsink didn't get too hot. That's only surfacetemp, but I guess it isn't more than 40c in middle of heatsink. And THE temperature, lowest I managed to get with this setup. -20C! It's 20C lower than temp without inverter... Just makes me wonder have I done something different... We'll see when this gets finished. Project has moved forward which is allways nice thing. Next I think I have to do something more booring, like cut some space for dual PSUs and so on.
Wohoo I installed wheels under the case. They're maybe a bit too massive but work nicely. And massive wheels somehow match with massive case Now I should go to shop and try to find nylocks(?) which don't loose by theirselves.. Allso I should buy blades to jigsaw, snapped two yesterday
update again. I've used jiqsaw quite much lately, here's one of results. Original PSU-hole isn't large enought for two PSUs, so I had to enlarge it a bit. I allmost finished it before blade snapped Now I have new ones but neighbours don't like sawing after 8pm... Maybe tomorrow. other thing I've done is mount wheels under the case. I found those wheels for free I allso used old mousepad to absord vibrations. I first installed them using tape. No problems occurred so I bolted them. However it didn't end well. I had to move wheels one or two cms because there were something on bolts way... You can guess if case started falling over after that...... I'm not sure what I'll do to that problem, have to find once again new way to do it, maybe smaller wheels. NEXT: Tomorrow I'll saw that stupid fingerguard away and make somekind of plate for 120mm fan. And tonight I think I'll modify an LA-radio mic and make it work on pc-use. I allso will modify headphone-amplifier so it'll take it's power from molex and it's output will be two RCA-jacks.
maybe i should try make a mini refergirator that fills 2 5.1/4 slots and build in a lcd display in the door to it. but i maybe dont have the stuff to do it
That's a pretty big case, it looks like it's big enough to live in almost... I like the idea you had of walling off the PSU's, so they had their own air in and out, that could work pretty well, which is why apple use it in the G5 I guess.
TTmodder: It'd sure look nice, but I think It's quite impossible to do.. Atleast it'd be deeper than CD-drives. phuzz: Now it seems I won't wall out PSU, only colacooler. And why is that? Because my uATX-PSU broke and now I have to use normal ATX, which doesn't fit there
