Hehe, Peltiers. You'd generally want to watercool the hot side because air just won't pull heat away fast enough to net cooler temperatures. Oh, and definately avoid the regular AS5 grease with those - although the ceramique stuff is safe.

If you use AS5 or other (real) silver compounds held in a grease on a peltier you can actually end up with the peltier shorting itself out because the silver will bond to the peltier.

If you want to know more on this (I've summarized it) read this thread, post #9 by Straight_Man - http://www.short-media.com/forum/showthread.php?t=8977


--------------------

As for the videocard, I've only seen the Rojak's Pot Radeon->FireGL mods. I couldn't find the 8500 Pencil-Mods. Thanks for the link.

Not sure if I'll do it because I don't have any decent cooling on my video card right now and anyways I couldn't afford to replace it if I broke it now. I just bought a $700 printer for $400 along with about $250 for a portable CF card copier w/ 40GB HDD (compared to buying ~2-4GB of high-speed CF media...much more bang for the buck)...so definately over $3,000 into photo stuff now

IIRC, I'm supposed to get another $2,000 in scholarships this month...I sure hope I don't spend it all on camera-related equipment, darn it!