I'm not a real smart guy, but I have been around the block a few times and I know what works. I was watercooling back when Tom Leufken was just starting to sell his waterblocks, I was using radical 60mm fans on heatsinks before fans on heatsinks were necessary. I had a first generation VapoChill phase change unit, and have also cooled with a Prometia unit. One other thing I did before anybody knew what the acronym stood for was cool a CPU with a TEC (Thermoelectric cooler). Cooling with a TEC back then meant that you had to seal your CPU socket, use dielectric grease, have a killer watercooling setup, wrap the entire thing in closed cell foam, and have a dedicated power supply. The reason that the sealing, grease, and foam was required was because you cooled the CPU below ambient which can cause condensation. The watercooling was required due to the intense heat that the top side of the TEC generated, and the dedicated power supply was needed because the TEC's normally used for extreme cooling pulled around 200W or more. Why did I go through all that trouble to cool with a TEC? Just to see if it would work. Did it work? Well... kinda. It cooled just fine but was a huge pain in the ass to maintain. The effort involved versus benefits received were weighted towards the effort part and I eventually pulled it to go back to straight water.

I have seen countless people on our forum post new threads like "Hey, I have a new cooling idea" or "Has anybody ever tried this?" when they first discover TEC cooling. I am usually quite patient when I explain that true TEC cooling requires a lot of work, but some of them are determined not heed advise of those who have been there before and try it out themselves. Invariably they use an underpowered TEC and find out that they have insulated their CPU instead of cooling it, or they use a very high powered TEC that they are unable to cool adequately and end up with worse temps than they had on air. There have been a couple of good attempts at using a TEC as a chilling unit for watercooling, but I have never seen a TEC used successfully while cooled by an air-cooled heatsink. That is why I approached the Ultra ChillTec cooler with quite a bit of skepticism. I have never seen a mass produced consumer level device that used a low powered TEC to successfully augment the task of air-cooling a CPU. I like the company that Ultra Products has become so I hope they are able to overcome my pessimism.

TEC Cooling Basics

Before we go any further, allow me to (very simply) explain what a thermoelectric cooler is and how it works. All you engineer's out there please skip this paragraph while I butcher this explanation. TEC's are sometimes referred to as Peltier devices, or Pelt, because it was a phenomenon first documented by Jean Peltier in 1834. He found that current passed through two dissimilar metals can cause the transfer of heat from one side to the other. The more current that you pass through, the more heat that can be transferred. That's why the most effective CPU cooling TEC's use hundreds of Watts; they have the capability of transferring large amounts of heat from one side to the other. However, there is one very large limitation - the cooling side will only be as efficient as the ability to whisk the heat away from the hot side. If you ever turned the juice on a TEC while holding it in your fingers you would see what I mean. Initially, the cold side becomes freezing cold while the hot side becomes almost too hot to hold. As you continue holding it, you would find that the cold side starts to warm up. That's because there is nothing taking the heat away from the hot side.

A low powered TEC is easily overwhelmed by the great amount of heat generated by the CPU, and a high powered TEC easily overwhelms itself if you don't have a means to whisk away the heat from the hot side. If you use an underpowered or under cooled TEC, all you have accomplished is placing a non-conductive layer between your CPU and heatsink. There are a lot of other factors involved with TEC cooling like electrons, thermal energy, and karma, but the bottom line is that low wattage TEC's cannot handle the heat from a modern CPU and high wattage TEC's require killer cooling to be efficient. Now back to the review.