and welcome to the WAN Show ladies and
gentlemen we're a little bit late but um at least we got the video done right
no no we didn't we didn't actually it was all for nothing really frustrated
we are doing a thermoelectric cooled computer but
instead of doing it kind of the um
like the the janky way well to be clear it's still janky it's
probably the jankiest thing we've ever made
we recently did a video on peltier or tech cooling with the basic conclusion
being that it's a giant boatload of suck we spent about three hundred dollars to
get pretty much the same no actually worse
performance worse than with a standard water cooling radiator and at the
fantastic cost of a couple hundred watts
of power consumption so we've taken all those learnings and we have crumpled
them into a big ball and put them in a fire because today's video is all about
taking peltier cooling and amping it up
a notch pun intended this right here
is a 545
watt peltier thermoelectric cooling
module so we are going to pump a whack ton of current through it we're gonna
have a hot side we're gonna have a cold side and we are gonna have potentially a
real good time or a real bad time
either way it's a great video right speaking of great videos this great
video is brought to you by our sponsor
i fix it the ifixit marlin screwdriver set features five specialty precision
screwdrivers and you can get yours at the link in the video description
so i noticed that you designed a water block is there a reason that other than
flexing the new workshop here that we didn't just use a standard water block
and put it on top of the tech yeah so a water block like this even
though it looks size wise like it's it should be a pretty good yeah cpus only
on the die they really create a lot of heat so water blocks
only really cool the center right so the actual fin structure of a
typical CPU water block is only about this big so what happens then to our
tech if we only cool the center of it
it just won't be as efficient and it's going to get really hot around the edges
so we had to design this fairly massive
block like if you it's hard to get a sense of the scale when we're looking at
it like this so how big is it the scale like these mounting holes right here
yeah are the same but but the actual size we're actually going
almost right to it so it's quite a bit larger yeah it's like
about this big so we have a 65
millimeter inner channel thing which is just a bit
larger than the diameter of this so it should work pretty well
unless it doesn't another reason we had to design our own block was that it
needs to have some special functionality like okay it's great in theory to say you
stick this on top to cool the hot side and then the CPU gets cooled by the cold
side but what keeps this in place
not just in place but clamped against
the cooling element so that it gets optimal thermal transfer well that's
where this type of sandwich design comes in so you can see we've got our cooling
element here on the top and then you can actually see this very nice attention to
detail by the way thank you i like this with the leads going in and everything
you can see the peltier element is sandwiched in between then
we've got these right here these bolt throughs are going to hold
these pieces together really really tightly and bind them to this
this cold plate at the bottom so
for much the same reason as we can't just attach a tiny cooling element to
the top of the hot side of the peltier and expect optimal efficiency we can't
take the cold side of the peltier and put that against a tiny little CPU and
hope that we're getting the most cooling out of it so we need to have something
to spread the cooling and that's going to be another
copper plate on the bottom that is also sandwiched around it
yeah so another problem that we have is that if you just put this on full
bore like if you just attach it to a power supply sure it's going to cool
down really really fast and really cold yeah so we could end up
with condensation um i mean really condensation yeah condensation lots of
water around your CPU not a great time so that's why we have this guy right
here it's a pid controller and do you
know what pid is actually i don't know what it stands for um proportional
integral and derivative okay so in a nutshell this is like an on
off switch temperature goes in and it says yes that is okay or no that is not
okay and if the temperature is okay then it
ah sends a signal to this guy and says don't turn on the peltier and if the
temperature is not okay it's too high it's higher than what we want then it'll
say hey he'll kick on and this will turn on our block yeah so
that's all well and good although it's a bit sketchy to just have
all of that electronic stuff put on the table
yeah so all that's going in this nice little box right here fun which you
might have noticed this doesn't quite fit so we can either
cut a hole in the top and have a big old fan or we can cut a slot and have it
just sticking out the side i'm a fan of that one because it's easier
okay sticking out the side cool you might be looking at this rather
primitive block and thinking there's no way that's going to cool a 545w peltier
so i'm going to prove it should be fine using solidworks flow simulation for the
simulation we've got a 545 watt heat source some thermal paste and a fluid
input with a flow rate of a d5 pump the only real assumption that i've made is
that the water would reach a steady state temperature of about 42 degrees
which seems reasonable enough given the huge radiator that we're using after
running the simulation we can see that the flow does a reasonably good job of going through the fins and the water
resistant temperature by about two degrees while making its way from one side to the other the temperature of the
peltier rises quickly at first but it hits steady state at around 54 degrees
after a minute or two which seems slightly low to me but basically
confirms that if we have a problem it's probably not due to bad cooling
oh man it's gonna be like the most full send video we've done in a while
but it's done right it's like done but not to like where i
normally would get it before a video are you sure
yeah so we have the bottom bit this also known as the base yes the base yep CPU
contacts the bottom here yep peltier it's pretty flat
yeah i actually laughed the stuff oh okay well that explains it so
yeah peltier it goes on there uh which way not sure we need to turn it on to find
that out and there's okay there's a little trace that's in there that's
where our thermal couple goes okay neat there we go we've got the
all soft bit yep also left all the surfaces were left
in this okay and then yeah this goes on there and
we're good to go all right so why don't we get this mess assembled and see where
we go from there yeah we basically have two tasks to do
here okay one we need to make a water cooling loop
and maybe equip this motherboard for
sub-zero depending on how we're feeling
and the other thing is this sketchy box
here needs to be turned into
a sketchy box that works so everything that needs to be here is
there but none of it is soldered none of it's soldered yeah
so they get to watch us solder and cringe again
yeah they're going to be really happy about that so this right here is our solid state relay it's going to just
turn our tech on and off based on how cold it is and
if it's going to cause condensation and crap pretty much all that's going into
there we have these two power supply leads that
are just cable mod cable extensions
goes in there goes the solid state relay and then
out through this port here to the peltier and
should be good okay so i've got a bit of an update for y'all uh first of all here
is our wait uh update number two
is this is the radiator alex was talking about
so this actually had a dedicated video on the channel like
five years ago or something like that but it's the phobia g changer
1080. basically it's three triple 120 mil rads
glued together to make for a nine by one twenty
millimeter radiator so we're gonna we're gonna pop that
like it's hot and uh
it's gonna cool things down good news everyone oh what's up
i found the perfect fans to use for our radiator here
oh no these are actually the ones uh
from whole room water cooling from the last
setup that we did that was this ridiculous and
uh all of the someone who disassembled it just left all of the screws like in
the fans so i don't even have to go find radiator screws i just
put these in
just wrapping up the radiator here
and that's it however many friggin watts of cooling that
is these are dirty in like a really
unsettling way like it's caked okay so
if i said i was five minutes from water loop completion how close are we
so everything in here is wired up except
that we need to do the painful bit these two guys right here need to get the
choppy chop and then what they get soldered together go to here and up
there and we're good to go oh i see it okay yeah what else do we need to do uh
besides that these two holes right here need to be
tapped the rest are all tapped oh my favorite yeah all right i guess i'm
gonna thread this thing wait we have a proper tap now don't we
do we have a beautiful handle yes whoa
yeah look at that thing look at this wow it's almost like it was
made to do this i've never been this excited to have
leverage
it only needs to be straight enough
oh okay well this is not going well
um so you won't be able to see it very well but basically i'm checking if the o-ring
is squeezed against the plexi there
and it looks like they are squeezed all the way around all right i think i got
him this box right here might be the
sketchiest thing i've ever done
like look at this it's just
it's a bit of a mess it's a bit of a mess and we're putting
like there's ac power in here we've got
what's going to be nearly like 600 watts going through
freaking lever nuts are we going to start a fire
um it's all within the rating okay these are
32 amps rated at that and we're expecting 32
amps so
so where do i connect this to
um so we need to put some wires onto here yep
and then those i was thinking maybe just lever not them to those
so we can disconnect it if we want got it
yeah soon
very soon okay this is probably the cold side so
we're gonna gamble and i'm just gonna start assembling it
all right uh all right here comes all the thermal
goop this is disgusting
this stuff is nasty wait
cold side heat absorb oh crap i put it in the upside down
oh no oh come on
how could i do that we're gonna have to give up and start rancho at some point
here though yeah so what was that about not wanting to do
this project the sketchy way because i seem to recall you saying
something about that oh i just remember like
at the start i had so many aspirations so this would not be totally sketchy i
want to see this thing fire up yeah same
and i'm at the point where even if it is literal fire i will settle for it okay
so before i put this on i should show you guys the finished assembly so here's where our water cools the hot side of
the peltier which is sandwiched in there and then here is where the cold side
cools our CPU um alex i can just put this on now right
yep and you're good to uh do your soldering
on the leads for the tech just like on here right um yeah sure good because
that's what you're doing okay this is not an amazing mounting mechanism
but i happen to have some screws that are almost exactly the right length
so we are going for a hard mount that is gnarly
the good news is you're going to get all that mounting pressure you wanted
yep the bad news is we might crack this piece of acrylic
all right well i'm going to plug this in here
if i have to blast a titan rtx i'm going to be so pissed off
all right so this power supply i'm going to turn it
on nothing died yet that's a good sign so now i'm gonna put this on and
if bad things happen i'll just flick the switch and turn it back off so three two
one the fan didn't turn on should it have
hmm
imagine something being potentially miswired in there
all right we should probably go to windshield yep
okay so heat we don't want that we want
cool yay we did it so i can put this down
yep okay all right so
this right here is set right now it's just to 20 degrees okay but
that seems fine the solid state relay actually is working
like how do you know because this right here has a sketchy
connection yeah so if you pull it out
and you hear a click and when you put it in you can hear it go cool coming in hot
what the hell well i couldn't find a big jug so i that
was such a good opportunity to like plug the merch you have i have the merch too
i just need more you have the water bottle yeah i know but that also has my
ice water in it i was drinking that so water
um we could have used like three all right let's fill this thing
okay well there's one mug down
all right now the game is on
oh it's not leaking so that's good so is there water running through that loop
yep oh you can also see that the bubbles are coming in here
and they're going not just through the middle but also all the way around too
okay fantastic so the block design is working as
intended oh my god what is going on here
so that means the radiator is full which is good uh
oh ball sacks my
well it's a good thing those fans were dead
the tech is so close to working yeah yeah are you sure
not 100 because you've said it a couple times now i am slightly more confident
this time that's nice if only confidence was what
it took to make something work then the uh hindenburg probably wouldn't
have been quite such a disaster what how is that related at all well they
were confident it was going to work i better they wouldn't have put a bunch of people in it yeah it worked really well
for quite a while
so we didn't run into this when we were using just a small peltier but it
occurred to us that with so much power we might be running into over current
protection limits on the pci express connector so
i thought well why don't we use the eight pin eps connector which is the CPU
power connector instead and see if we can overcome the problem that way and
what's really convenient is that this is not by design and you shouldn't ever do
this if you can avoid it but fun fact you can jam an eps mail connector
into a pci express um female receptacle and all the pins
will make contact it's just really like it's kind of a bit to get it back out so
all we have to do is redo the the wiring here into your adapter so it's actually
a pretty it's almost a plug-and-play solution
plug-in prey more like it all right good luck everybody
oh oh temperatures dropping temperatures dropping very fast really we're at 20
degrees 19 don't touch that
we're at 16 degrees yeah that's definitely working okay
whoa so we're ready to rock yes should we see if our relay works because
maybe the relay wasn't the problem before well if we want to just jam the
other ones into this then the other power supply might work wait oh right
the relay is a good right yeah we want the relay yeah okay
okay oh man i told you this is hard to take
out so theoretically this turns on yeah
drops to 15 degrees and then the relay
stops it really okay all right it's on
okay the temperature's dropping real fast now so we just went past
15 degrees oh yep and the thing the thing hit turned off
oh this definitely needs some tuning though oh yeah so just auto-tune if you hold
that just do make your computer videos
that was not necessary achieve this
okay and so the relay doesn't work alex
i'm not totally sure did you just have it configured wrong
does our oh does this thing read negative temperatures it seems like no
oh come on that's great so because the
relay now serves absolutely no purpose we don't have to deal with its uh
limitation when it comes to reading negative temperature values
check it out the old yellow and gray multi-logger
thermometer makes an appearance it's back from the dead baby
okay so CPU temps are dropping
dropping we're at 15 11.
we're three on the tech so we need to hit this thing with a load
because we at idle like this is such
cooling overkill that it is ridiculous like we can't we
can't keep turning it on and off like this all the time uh so which one
classroom i'm gonna maybe bmw what's the speed at right now uh
okay it looks stuck yeah okay so bmw CPU
here we go okay
here we go CPU temps are up in the 50s 60s 70s get that tech turned on baby oh
yeah it's on did we overwhelm it already oh yeah it's just 34 35
we're at like 85 degrees come on
there's no way that we did all of this for it to just crap out like that
oh we're throttling we're throttling
we throttled son we overwhelmed the tech okay hold on a
second let's stop the stop the blender stop the
fire wait hold on stop escape yeah now it's dropping like
from 40 it's dropping fast alex insisted we get our hands on a
variable voltage power supply so here's a 15 to 24 volt power supply let's fire
this thing up and you need to be more excited we're doing it we're testing it it's
going to work it's going to be great
i don't actually believe what i just said okay testing oh it's going up
it's going up fast but i can turn up the voltage now
right we're at 330 watts now 380 watts how
how's your temperatures there we're at 22 volts
we're at 373 watts it's going up fast there i actually
didn't bother okay i'm just going to stop this test hold on we're at 24 volts
744 watts i would probably keep the test on we are dropping temperature quickly
here we are at 22 we are 21. we're at 20
degrees 19 degrees that's the heat on the block
here whoa that copper is hot
okay the pump's running right no yeah the pump's running holy crap
all right we're at 900 watts on this thing all right
we're already up to 90 degrees on the CPU so
if we're doing 90 watts on the telp 900
we're doing 900 watts oh yeah we're at 105 degrees that copper's hot something
smells like burning we got to turn this off
okay if we're drawing like 900 watts and it
still is thermal throttling there's no way techs are ever going to cool at 7
900. i told you yeah
so in a nutshell um
tech cooling is and was a bad idea
and everything that i told you in your first week here
was true yeah it's a bad idea and nobody
should do it because even with a super
high powered tech the
power inefficiency the fact that you need so much more
cooling capacity because you have to cool the CPU
and all the waste heat off of your tech the complexity of the setup and the
relays and crap that you need to set up in order to avoid condensation
and the fact that you are still going to be
limited to like high-end consumer processors at best
that you can actually effectively cool with attack all these limitations oh
yeah cost need i go on mean that tech cooling is a pretty bad time
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so thanks for watching guys sorry this was such a disappointment to you and alex alike wow we just totally didn't
even have to build this relay box to just find out it wasn't gonna work
yeah it's a lot of work hey but it was a learning experience yeah about listening
to your boss next time
what