Cooling A PC With Fridge/Freezer components?

CXH4

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Apr 18, 2016
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I came across a video that had shown a mod in which someone took a fridge and modified some of the parts to fit onto his CPU. This made me curious on whether someone here on the forum has done something similar to this. I would personally give this a try, if I had the proper knowledge and parts to do so, but out of curiosity has anyone tried or heard of something like this?

Here's the link to the video that I found on this:
 

PlayfulPhoenix

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Feb 22, 2015
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I can't watch the video as I'm on mobile, but I'd imagine they've just got a coolant loop that runs through a compressor to chill the coolant?

That makes for an interesting science experiment, but compressors are large, noisy, and very inefficient. If active cooling is what you're after, you'd want to use a peltier cooler, which is basically a metal and ceramic plate that passes a DC current through a substrate. This cools one side (easily below freezing point) and heats the other, which you can then cool with a traditional water loop.

IIRC, there was at least one PC company that sold custom builds with that sort of system. They were impressive insofar that you could literally have massively overclocked parts that ran continuously at zero degrees, but the systems were both wildly expensive and wildly impractical since you'd have to figure out how to avoid condensation and other problems.

As far as I know, these have basically fallen away as power consumption of parts has dropped.
 
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CXH4

SFF Lingo Aficionado
Original poster
Apr 18, 2016
136
87
I can't watch the video as I'm on mobile, but I'd imagine they've just got a coolant loop that runs through a compressor to chill the coolant?

That makes for an interesting science experiment, but compressors are large, noisy, and very inefficient. If active cooling is what you're after, you'd want to use a peltier cooler, which is basically a metal and ceramic plate that passes a DC current through a substrate. This cools one side (easily below freezing point) and heats the other, which you can then cool with a traditional water loop.

IIRC, there was at least one PC company that sold custom builds with that sort of system. They were impressive insofar that you could literally have massively overclocked parts that ran continuously at zero degrees, but the systems were both wildly expensive and wildly impractical since you'd have to figure out how to avoid condensation and other problems.

As far as I know, these have basically fallen away as power consumption of parts has dropped.

Thank you, and that has definitely shed some light on my question.
 

Necere

Shrink Ray Wielder
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Feb 22, 2015
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I came across a video that had shown a mod in which someone took a fridge and modified some of the parts to fit onto his CPU. This made me curious on whether someone here on the forum has done something similar to this. I would personally give this a try, if I had the proper knowledge and parts to do so, but out of curiosity has anyone tried or heard of something like this?

Here's the link to the video that I found on this:
Look up "phase change cooling." It's the same thing as refrigerators use and people have been using it for cooling PCs at least back into the 90s. They seem to have fallen out of favor in the last few years, however. You almost never see people do phase change builds anymore, probably because being able to overclock heavily isn't as enticing as it used to be, what with modern CPUs being quite capable already.

That makes for an interesting science experiment, but compressors are large, noisy, and very inefficient. If active cooling is what you're after, you'd want to use a peltier cooler, which is basically a metal and ceramic plate that passes a DC current through a substrate.
While Peltiers are solid state and therefore don't generate any noise themselves, and are much more compact, they're actually less efficient (technically Coefficient of Performance is the correct term) than compressors.
 

Phuncz

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May 9, 2015
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(Asetek) Vapochill was one of those Phase Change Cooling brands, but it seems to not exist anymore.



It was indeed only useful if you were intending to OC beyond 50% or so. Units costed near 1000$ if I remember correctly and you'd need not only to insulate the surrounding area of the CPU for condensation, but also be very knowledgable about overclocking to deal with problems surrounding sub-zero cooling. It often meant voltage mods via soldering, finding components that work at those temperatures (cold bug) and components would have a limited lifetime and the build would be difficult to transport.

I don't know if this would scale properly to a smaller format that would allow installation in lets say 20L cases. In the end watercooling pumps have also been integrated while it used to be large aquarium pumps.