Plague

The point of this guide is to save you some money by making your own PSU. You COULD buy a cheap meanwell for $90 or do this easy mod and save 50bucks. Only down side to this is your gonna have to find a place to put an extra full sized PSU.



What you need

Power supply with at least 24A on the 12v rail

Thick wire (preferably from an electrical device)

Solder Iron and Solder

226 Watt 12v TEC

ATX Power Supply Bypass Adapter

Electrical tape or Heatshrink tubing

Where to buy:

Power Supply $16 +7 shipping

Thick wire: think of something

Solder Iron and solder $9+4

226 Watt 12v TEC $35 +5 shipping

ATX Power Supply Bypass Adapter $5 +5 shipping


Total: $86 including shipping


Power supply modding
You will notice that on a peltier there are two wires, black and red. The whole point in this mod is to connect the black and red wires together with the black and yellow(red is 5v not 12) wires on the PSU. The only problem with this is the wires on the PSU are so thin that they will eventually melt because of the added current from the peltier, so now the fun begins!


Step One
Open the power supply, and cut every wire that connects to a molex connecter. Cut every wire except anything that is connected to the 20pin connecter that goes into the motherboard.


Step Two
Put all the black (ground), red (5v) and yellow (12v) wires together in their own groups and wrap them in electrical tape or heatshrink tubing. DO NOT group different colors together (for example putting the black and red wires together) or else you will short the psu and possibly cause a fire. It should look something like this.



Step Three

Unscrew the power supply so that you can see the underside.

Take out your thick wires and solder one of them to where the black wires are located and another to where the yellow wires(not red) are located so it should look like this. Now make a knot with the think wire so it will prevent the wires from disconnecting if pulled on.

__________________
-Crash

Plague

Step Four

Now take one side of the thick wire you soldered on the PSU and attach it to one of the wires attached on the TEC. Do the same with the other wires. Next, wrap some electrical tape on each of the wires, so the end product should look like this.




Step Five

Insert the PSU bypass adapter into the right place on the 20pin Molex connecter. You can do this by connecting the "green" wire and any "black" wires.



Step Six

Plug in the power supply and while your touching both sides of the peltier, power up the power supply for NO MORE than 2 seconds. When the power supply is on, one of the sides of the peltier should get very cold and the other side should get very hot(not enough to hurt you). The side that was cold should eventually get hot because the hot side also heated the cold side. The point of this last step was to tell you which side you would apply to the cpu (cold side).

__________________
-Crash

Plague

There you go! A working PSU for your peltier. Congrads! Now all you need is good air cooling or a watercooling rig to cool the hot side of the peltier.



-Plague

__________________
-Crash

Sai_Jao

cool man but bit uneasy bout openin a psu , they can hold a charge for a long time

burntradeon

Lol - what were you thinking ? Saving money? Your hospital bill will be more than a new power supply. but what do I know.

mantice2000

can you just use the actual wires to connect to instead of soldering?
If you can then just use an extra psu and use the wires from the 20pin connector, maybe safer and u have the original case power as well as the power for the Peltier. Btw, the Peltier idea sound cool but how well does it work with an overclocked 3700 and how much cooling is needed to keep it running at 100% so it doesn't cancel itself out? I don't know much about the Peltier system....

Licht

I'm afraid of electricity... that charge post has me scared away from this lol.

Anyways nicely done just wish the picks were a little less fuzzy.

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Khriez

Is this mod safe? I need details, I can't afford a meanwell PSU right now But I got a free PSU lying around.

Can a Thermaltake 400W PSU (it was 40 bucks when I bought it 1-2 years ago) handle this mod for an 80W peltier? Also will plan on buying more powerful peltiers in the future.

EDIT, what gauge of thick wire would I need?

gonX

At least 8AWG for a 80W peltier.

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DuckieHo

You mean 18AWG, right?

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To answer most of your questions: (1) a fridge cannot cool a PC (2) 64-bit OS for over 3.4GB (3) If a PCIe card fits, it should work (4) Resolution, not screen size (5) If you have a question, it is not news (6) Report, not respond to Spam (7) Single-Rail/Non-Modular PSUs are not always better than Multi-Rail/Modular