I used peltier coolers on K6 processors 1M computer years ago. They worked great and lasted about as long as the PCs did.
Not long after I bought mine, they disappeared from cooler offerings. I've wondered what became of the tech.
Not long after I bought mine, they disappeared from cooler offerings. I've wondered what became of the tech.
Remember that Peltier coolers don't make heat disappear - they just move it from one side of the cooler to the other, and produce a lot of additional waste heat in the process. There are better ways of transferring heat from a hot IC to a heat sink nowadays - like liquid cooling for really high-performance systems, or capillary-action heat pipes for more typical needs.
Peltiers were always a bad way to move the heat. What they offered was the ability to go below ambient, which at the time could improve overclocking. Peltiers of course lacked the capacity to actually take you there with any decent load, but in theory it could.
It never really made much sense for consumers, and once consumers realized that, the market went away.
(You can see a demo here where LTT try it, and they, after dumping 500W into the cooler, can get the CPU to a vaguely reasonable temperature, until they actually load it up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWrqyQWfhrs)
Modern performance CPUs have TDPs in the 100-200W range.
Peltier cooling generates a lot of additional heat. It doesn’t scale well to the higher loads. That’s why you don’t see them any more.
I'd really like to try out these better peltiers, our current ones suck. And the fans to remove the heat are huge and loud.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetocaloric_effect
and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elastocaloric_materials
of course they also have the dew point problem, but so do ordinary refrigerators and freezers.