I am tired of my xbox360 temperature (40 celcious here in greece) so i decided to put a 360 in a small barebone case and assemble a better cooling system. I was thinking to get two small peltiers that will work with the barebones psu and put two heatsinks with blowers... Has anyone made anything with peltiers? What should i pay attention?
Peltiers will cool below room temperature so condensation is a serious issue. Generally systems with peltiers should be left on constantly. Not a good fit for a console, really. You'd be better off buying one of the pre-built replacement cases that are around. I think Coolermaster did one.
The only thing I've ever used peltiers for is for cooling my drinks, and with the amount of condensation you will get on them, I would avoid putting them near anything critical. Might be useful for some sort of heatpipe or liquid cooling setup.
What everyone else said (I think the Lian Li case is still available), especially the part about it being used with liquid cooling. One side of the peltier chip will get really cold, and the other side really hot. If you don't have a means of moving heat away from the hot side (and standard air cooling heat sink isn't enough in many cases), you'll fry the peltier chip and possibly the CPU and GPU. If you really want to do "better" than the stock system, find the Lian Li case (PC-XB01, though it's listed as a "historical" case so probably not manufactured anymore) and quality fans (Yate Loon D12SM-12 - 120mm fan). It even has holes for passing tubing through (definitely will want to add grommets to prevent slicing of the tubing if they don't add it already) for water cooling (Koolance offers a cooling kit including the waterblock, precut tubing and an Exos2 kit (radiator+fans/pump/reservoir). Water cooling, however, will not lower the temps of the chip below room temperature (so if it was 30°C in the room, you could never cool it lower than that). As a side note, MS may want to consult an HVAC engineer when they design their next gen system to explain to them what proper air flow is and that slapping a bigger heatsink in the same piss poor air flow situation is barely a bandaid solution.
Thanks for the help guys, didnt know there were cases like that! I will try to put it in a barebone box and make a better airflow system with fans and better heatsinks...
Peltier condensation can be combatted the same way it is with anything that runs cooler than water cooling: lots of insulation. Usually the area under the CPU, around the socket and under the socket is coated with some sort of material that doesn't conduct electricity or allows water to build up. Kind of a mess solution but it works.
