Dave's office PC fridge mod

When your drinks are getting warm, keeping your computer cool comes a distant second.

Due to the unhealthy amounts of caffeine that I have no option but to consume on a daily basis (it's written into my job description), I spent a few minutes today doing a quick PC mod to make the caffeine delivery system more efficient.

I've had a small cigarette lighter powered fridge sitting next to my desk for a while now. It's driven by a peltier that can cool or heat the inside, and it conveniently fits what I'm assuming will be either four cans of coke or six cans of V/Red Bull.

Since it's used to running on a car's DC output -- be it 12 or 13.8 volts depending on if the alternator's running -- there's no reason why it shouldn't have run on the 12V rail of my office machine's power supply. And certainly not since last year, when out of frustration and due to my insistence on running 4 Adobe applications, Outlook, several word documents, countless tiny applications and no less than 30 browser tabs simultaneously I replaced my old corporate box with a 3 GHz machine that I built from lab parts (which is now running at 3.8 GHz) that's powered by a beefy power supply.

I sliced off the cigarette lighter end and got to work. I threaded the wire through the back of the case where some sort of backplane would normally have been, but which was thrown away long ago during the build when I decided it annoyed me. It's the wire on the right of the graphics card.



Since Dick Smith is slowly turning into Bing Lee and there's no Jaycar Electronics within walking distance of the office, I abandoned my original idea of buying a molex connector and soldering its 12v pins to the fridge's leads. Instead I grabbed a terminal block and cut off two contacts, which screw down to the fridge leads in one end and the 12V line that I'd lopped off my PSU in the other.

For the record, Jaycar itself is slowly turning into Granny May's.



Box it all back up again, plug it in and switch it on.

Voila.



Would you believe that that’s the state of my desk after I spend half the day cleaning it?