Warning! Mushkin peltier heatsinks don't even waste your money!

[Stryker]

I am so pisssed right now its not even funny!
I just got a 3 fan heatsink with two peltier pads on it from Mushkin. I knew I was in trouble when I took it out of the bag and screws that hold the fans to the heat sink started falling out. Maybe if they did not use wood screws they would have stayed in, sheesh!

I tried it out after replacing the screws. Now, my old heatsink was a cheapy, I was a one inch thick heatsink with a single fan cliped on the middle. My P2-333 OCed at 400/100 core 2.00V had a heat range between 91F and 98F depending on the apps I was using with this heatsink.

Ok, now for the real ****, I installed the new super heatsink and fired up my system. Just sitting at the desktop not running any apps except explorer and systray I get 105.8F! If I so much as run a Sandra software cpu bench mark that takes all of 10 seconds it zooms to 112.4F! If I try to run Q2 It hits 112 right away and keeps climbing. I exited the game I did not want to see just How hot it would get.

I took the heatsink and cpu back out and took it apart. The peltier pads were hot enough to fry an egg. I thought the side of the peltier that touches the CPU was supposed to create cold, guess not.

Mushkin will get and ear full tommorow you can bank on that. What a **** waste of money!

[shocker]

Sounds like the polarity of the peltier coolers are reversed.

Have you checked this, or are you just going to send it back?

[Stryker]

Well the pads were indeed wired backwards. It works ok now but it only shaved off about 5 degrees faren from my previous heatsinks measurement. With the pads wired backwards and the screws falling out leads me to believe who ever put that together must have been drunk that day.

In my opinion, shaving off 5 degrees is not worth the $64 bucks I paid.

[shocker]

Just be thankful you didn't fry your processor having the peltier feeding heat into the thing.

I switched to a 3 fan Glacier 4500C and knocked 10 degrees off the stock Intel fan's temp. $35.00 if you want to spend more...

I'd see if you can send your Mushkin back, since it was wired backwards. I would have been pissed too!

Have you made sure that your heatsink compound is as thin as it can be?

I put the compound on, put the cooler on. Took it apart, scaped off the cooler, put it back together, took it apart again, checked to see if everything was making contact and reassembled. Kind of a pain in the ****, but you have better thermal transfer if you can get a thin layer.

I'm curious what type of fan you originally had...