USB CPU cooler mod

Justin Robinson gets bored, tech gets taken apart and repurposed.

The Atomic labs can be an amazing place - full of heatsinks, watercooling and sometimes even the roar of the phase change. But the one thing that we’ve never looked at – the USB powered drink cooler gathering dust in the corner.

We have had the Coolit USB Beverage Chiller lying around, not chilling anything. In between reviews for the next issue, we thought that some delicate modding was in order. Grabbing the nearest screwdriver, we pulled the device out of the plastic housing, and slapped it onto a Phenom X4 9350e CPU using copious amounts of cable ties:



Things got a little toasty, due to the peltier (the main driving technology behind the chiller, read more here) only running at a measly 5V, supplied through the USB cable. So, naturally, we overclocked the peltier by modding a molex cable to pump 12V through instead:



This achieved an idle temp of 30 degrees, so naturally our next step was to stress it, using the OCCT. Sadly, the small peltier could not handle the heat load, with temps jumping to over 65 degrees in less than a minute. In true Atomic spirit, pictures were taken first before shutting it down to prevent damage:



While not stable for a long period of time, it would run superPI and wPrime just fine, so we decided to push how far we could get them . We hit a wall at 230, or 2.3GHz over 2GHz stock, which is bloody amazing for a device intended to cool cans of drink!

This isn’t really a sensible idea (as the peltier’s lifespan would be shortened significantly), but it definitely is far from horrible, and actually idles at lower than the stock cooler. Here are a few more pics, just to give you an idea of how we mounted it: