TEC Newbie Question

[Onycho]

Okay...been reading quite a bit and I want to know if the idea I have is crazy (good or bad, prefer crazy good).

Idea started here: http://www.swiftnets.com/products/MCWCHILL-452.asp

I saw this in a review and thought to myself, well maybe I can do better than it can. The idea sprang forth...

My starting case is a (don't laugh) Koolance P2-650. I got it before I had any idea about what I was doing (still don't know if I do). I figure instead of throwing it away, it looks nice enough, I'll use it solely to cool my harddrives (2x74 GB WD Raptors).

Now for chilling the CPU, GPU and chipset...

Was thinking to take 4 226W pelts and do similiar to above. Sandwich a homebuilt copper block between the 4 pelts and then drop another waterblock on top of the pelts to cool them (dual loop). The pelt cooler would be housed in a separate case. Each waterblock would run to a separate radiator y-together, 2L resevoir, pump, y-apart to the two blocks. Plan would be to have the radiators on the sides of the case, 2x120mm fans on each pulling air from the outside of the case, through the radiators and then have it go into a y'd duct that would then blow out the top of the case. Then I'd run a loop from the inner cold block out the back and into my main case. There would also be a 2L resevoir for my cold loop as well. I'd also want to put a controller on the system so that when it would shut down, it'd step the temp up slowly so as to not risk cracking any of my components.

And just as a final extreme measure, I'd put MCW5002-64T with a 226W pelt on it for the CPU.

System it would be running on is an ASUS A8N SLI Deluxe running 2 Nvidia 6800 Ultras (PCI E) and an AMD64...hopefully the 939s will have improved enough (I plan on building this over the next 6-9 months).

So am I crazy? Also, with the power this is eating up, would I just be better going with phase change?

Any suggestions would be good.

[froudeg]

4x 226W peltiers at 12 volts would consume near on 1000 watts, ie put out 1000 watts of heat.

Powering them is going to be tricky - remember if you plan to use 4 ATX psu's, unless they're one of the few that dont need no 5v load (ie antec truepowers) then you will need to make artificial load on 5v lines to ever get 12v to hold.

Then 3rd problem - this is a liquid chiller....so all hoses need to be insulated along with the entire block on the cpu etc.

Finally u cant just use water - you will need something that works down to -20c sorta temps.....antifreeze mixtures r horrible, remember antifreeze is technically anti-boil (it was designed to raise boiling point not lower freezing point) - and it turns to sludge below -10c. Alternatives are methanol and water (somewhat flammable and requires special hosing)

I've done a whack of research into making a liquid chiller out of peltiers - even though its possible the power it consumes and hence heat it puts out is ludicrous, a phase change setup could do a better job, be far smaller and only consume a couple hundred watts.

For me, any liquid chiller i build, i would want to use preflurocarbon liquids such as inertx - as everything else has too many problems.