Extreme Cooling Devices - Freeze Your CPU

There are a lot of computer cooling devices and methods available to the computer geek or performance addict. From the simple air moving coolers that have been around from the first built computer to the exotic thermoelectric systems, there is a cooling method and device for every situation and computer system. Most traditional cooling methods and systems have the big disadvantage of keeping the hardware part they are supposed to cool at a very close point to the room temperature that particular hardware is in. If the room temperature is low, everything is fine and the traditional air cooling system is doing a very good job for a small amount of money (most air cooling solutions are pretty inexpensive), requiring maintenance only from time to time (dust is the ultimate enemy of all cooling solutions). Imagine now that you are using your computer in a those hot summer days, in a sunny room where the temperature reaches 30� Celsius and the air cooling system that served you so well in the colder days of winter and spring is now suddenly struggling to keep your processor, chipset and video card from going up in flames.

Apart from the air cooled solutions, users with the desire to improve the cooling and the performance of their computers can jump for the liquid cooling kits that are available just about everywhere nowadays. Unlike the air cooling solutions, liquid-using kits have an increased efficiency, but they are more pricey and limited by the same impossibility to cool below room temperature. In fact, there are only two cooling solutions available to the general computer user: the thermoelectric cooling and the refrigeration method. Thermoelectric cooling has been known for a long time and was employed in a variety of situations where the need for a very efficient cooling system is paramount. Thermoelectric cooling relies on the principle of the Peltier effect, which states that electrons passing through "semiconductor materials with alternating conductive properties absorb ambient heat energy in order to travel through one of the materials and expend this energy as they travel through the other material" according to the site Electronic Products.

Those semiconductor materials can be arranged in the shape of a plate or a small module that will be very cold on one side and very hot on the other. "Such thermoelectric modules alone would not be suitable for most cooling applications, but they are at the heart of any thermoelectric cooler. The addition of heat sinks, fans, fins, cold plates, liquid jackets, and the like allow thermoelectric devices to be built in the form of air conditioners, liquid chillers, and cold plates". Because of the solid state nature of the thermoelectric cooling devices, they do not exchange air or in fact no other material either with the ambient environment. "The cooling of computer electronics by this method is especially common, as is the cooling of individual computer chips by direct contact with tiny thermoelectric cold plates", that can lower the temperature of the cooled hardware component under the ambient temperature, making the thermoelectric cooling devices especially suitable for heavy overclocking or computers operating in hot environments.

The selection of an appropriate thermoelectric cooling device for a particular computer is very simple as most producers offer free software suites that can calculate the required size and cooling power needed. One single drawback affects the thermoelectric cooling devices and this is the necessary power to operate. Their power requirements varies greatly and as a general rule, the greater the temperature difference that can be achieved between the cold plate and the environment, the greater the power needed will be.