We have already described the working principle of a thermo-electric cooler in our article called Titan Amanda TEC (Thermal Electronic Chip) Cooler Review. This time I would only like to share with you a scheme borrowed from the official Ultra Chill-TEC web-page:

We have already dwelled on the lack of additional fan and some differences in the fan design that have negative effect on the cooling efficiency of this solution. Now we would like to stress one of the most significant advantages of this product; the control unit that comes bundled with it. If you remember in case of Titan Amanda TEC the control functions were performed by a small PCI card installed into the corresponding mainboard PCI slot. In case of Ultra Chill-TEC there is a special unit that fits into the 5-inch bay of the system chassis:

The unit is equipped with an LCD display with a choice of backlight colors (you can set it to yellow, green, blue, light-blue or purple) and a button to switch between temperature scales: Fahrenheit/Centigrade. No other functions are available unfortunately.

On the rear side of the box there is a connector for the thermo-electric unit, a connector for control and monitoring cable and a power connector:

The control unit is not a small one: 150mm x 147mm x 43mm, so I decided to take a peak inside. It turned out that there isn’t much really:

And the unit has been made quite long to make it easier for you to connect the cables to its rear panel, inside there are only two connector chips:

The control unit is responsible for proper functioning of the Peltier module and adjusts its power automatically depending on the current temperature. It also adjusts the fan rotation speed. Besides that, the unit also performs some monitoring functions that have been implemented in a pretty original way:

Besides the temperature of the Peltier element and the operational time, the LCD display also features an animated image of a digging man. The more active is the Peltier element and the cooler overall, the faster is the man digging. It struck me as a pretty strange association, I have to admit :)