Any news on the cascade xxx?

[TerraMex]

According to Cathar, he wont make them for sale.

Originally Posted by Cathar

Before you guys all start jumping on the "me too" bandwagon, I need to stress that the XS is a bit of a special prototype. I don't really intend to sell it in any quantity. I may never make more than 7 or so. The XS is an R&D block that will go towards helping me decide whether I have things right for a Cascade II. I'm just letting you guys in on some early R&D that's all. The machining time for it is pretty high and it's not really something that I think many people would want to pay that much for. Rough guess for an XS - approaching $230-250 (Australian) even if it were to be made in copper. The lessons learned here will fold back into a design I've drawn up for a far easier to machine Cascade II, which will sacrifice some of the bleeding-edge machining tolerances of the XS in order to create a balanced block that should be very near as good. What I'm saying is - still a long way to go from here. Think of how car companies make hard-edged prototypes that go like the clappers but cost a silly amount, and then soften it up a bit to make in into something that actually can be justifiably made, but still retain 90% of its origins.

Originally Posted by Cathar

Well I've suffered a setback. Picked up the completed block today. The tubes are a little clogged up which is due to the way that polycarbonate machines, which is basically not very well. I went to clean out the tubes and some of the tubes just bent away and fell apart. I attribute this mostly to the "too deep" machining of the tubes, with them being bent sideways while rubbing and vibrating against the cutter as it was cutting down. Overall the tube walls are about as thick as on the Cascade and it never had such issues, so I can only guess that the bending while being machined did something bad. The bases of the tubes also look to be "stressed". So basically this middle plate is a no-go. Will have to do two things. One - ensure that the next plate is done properly. Two - head down to the plastic merchant and find something appropriate. As it stands, perhaps 15% of the jets are damaged, including right over where the CPU would go, so I can't really test the block for overclock stability if the jets aren't doing their thing.

Originally Posted by Cathar

Well I've declared this middle plate attempt a failure due to the issues raised above. I've had a chat to the machinists about fixing the issues and we'll be making up two more middle plates - one in polycarb with focus on getting the jets nice and clear, and one in Delrin. The Delrin one will probably get made first, however due to the machinist's work schedule and Easter, we're probably looking at 2 weeks away before I get a replacement middle plate.

Messy, some from OCAU. But the core is here.

[Les]

Adams,Foster,and Round sometimes talk crap.
However we all think.

[Blackeagle]

Well Cascade II is what I'm refering to TerraMax. These proto type blocks are plainly that. I'd rather get the silver version of the Cascade II or XS or whatever Cathar decides to call it.

And with optimisation of the cup bases as well as tube numbers and sizing, it should work very well.

Note that my interest in this Cascade XS only came about when talk shifted to the base alterations. While shrinking tht tubes and making them more numerous also means they will be even easier to have them clog. With fewer tubes than the XXX Cascade the Cascade with altered bases interests me far more. It's greater machinablity combined with higher performance should be nothing short of great.

And I'd no illusions TerraMax that these were ready for the market at this time, or even soon. But the base alterations IMO will be the key to finding the optimised design for the next version of the Casscade.

[BillA]

Originally Posted by Les

Adams,Foster,and Round sometimes talk crap.
However we all think.

Les
it is easier to ignore the statements of the uninformed

Blackeagle
fanboyism is cool, but your enthusiasm exceeds your accuracy

the TC4

others


so the TC4, a good block in its day, was subsequently exceeded handily by the MCW5002, among others (AquaJoe, etc)
if you describe history, get it right
and your ability to forecast the future is questionable as you are outside the 'group' that is making it happen

there is a truly large amount of research/data on jet impingement (in a confined area), and the ability to model such is 'easy' (with $$$$$$ of course)
- Cathar's activities should be appreciated for what they are, the balls out search for the highest performance possible

sure there are a few who will pay big bucks for 'the best' (me too, eh ?)
but do not confuse such with mainstream WCing
- stay tuned, you will see the manifestation of just exactly this point in several weeks

[Blackeagle]

Bill,

Bad day? :shrug:

Fanboyism? I'll gladly plead guilty where Cathar is concerned. The blocks he's brought to market have moved the boundrys back a good bit in water cooling. And if he comes up with a Cascade II or whatever name he might give it, it'll help to keep the other block makers at work to improve.

Love the little hints you like to drop. I'm always interested in new stuff coming out.

Have a nice day!

[BillA]

there is much not apparent to 'outsiders' (who fail to lOOk)

for another example (if you did not follow my hint on jets) take the RBX,
ALL of its features are extensively described in 'the literature', whether the (non-DD) designer knew of them or not
(I have my suspicions regarding such, but no facts obviously)
-> do not be confused, the RBX is an advance based on the WW, even if not particularly well implemented (or presented to the public)

is Cathar an impetus to the commercial wb mfgrs ?
for sure, all this to his credit (I'm a fan of his as well, eh ?)

but remember always that there are many ways to skin a cat;
mfgrs make products that can be sold at a profit, such is our system
yes, Ford owns Ferrari; but this was not done to improve the Fiesta

[Jabo]

I keep following developments and when I see actual figures I begin to wonder if diminishing returns point was passed some time ago? All the energy and time and $$$$ spent on Cascade SS and super small tube sizes.... is the improvement substantial enough to justyfi it? Don't get me wrong here, I don't want to be a party pooper but I like to ask such questions

On the side note, I think it was Les who posted link to a page with some calculator dor convective heat transfer coeeficient for a water jet. It remided me of another thread about Cathar's blocks here on procooling. I reminded me of this thread bacause drawing showed on this calculator page neatly supported my suggestion for improvemnt of jet type block - designing out stagnation zones while at the same time increasing surface area and jet pressure by decreasing&modelling cross sectional water jet area.
This would allow for bigger diameter jets, fewr ot them, cheaper (shorter) CNC and higher stress durability.

Earlier on Cathar was quoted writing about the need for suoer clean system... micro water filters.... I think BillA is right by saying this is not for the masses

[gruntledweasel]

Blackeagle
fanboyism is cool, but your enthusiasm exceeds your accuracy

- Cathar's activities should be appreciated for what they are, the balls out search for the highest performance possible

At the risk of revealing myself to be the uninformed outsider that I am...
Bill, it sounds to me like Cathar is quite interested in making changes that may impede performance a bit, with the gain of simplifying the design and making the block significantly easier to machine. Perhaps "highest performance produceable" would be more accurate?

- stay tuned, you will see the manifestation of just exactly this point in several weeks

Sweet, I sure hope we can take this to mean Swiftech's gonna have a new block out soon?

yes, Ford owns Ferrari; but this was not done to improve the Fiesta

ZOMG they're gonna hire Cathar!
Kidding, kidding....I wouldn't want to imply that Swiftech is in any way not a "performance" manufacturer.

edit:typo

[bigben2k]

Oh we're way passed profitability: we're nearing insanity here!

You can find some articles here:
http://www.cooling-electronics.com/html/articles.html

[BillA]

gruntledweasel
define the measurement criteria
its not temps, its the OC that Cathar is using to define performance
(with which I concur even if NOT an OCer myself)

Ben
more productive will be those publications beginning with "Journal of . . . . .
go to the Uni, expect to spend some days
digest that, then start on the "Proceedings of . . . . .
lots more days

no free lunch

[bigben2k]

Originally Posted by unregistered

...more productive will be those publications beginning with "Journal of . . . . .
go to the Uni, expect to spend some days
digest that, then start on the "Proceedings of . . . . .
lots more days

no free lunch

The Uni?!?

???
http://www.uni.edu/
???

[BillA]

OZ lingo, any University/Engineering library
-> access to these huge dbs of tech papers

[gruntledweasel]

Originally Posted by unregistered

gruntledweasel
define the measurement criteria
its not temps, its the OC that Cathar is using to define performance
(with which I concur even if NOT an OCer myself)

My ignorance has been revealed and duly noted then, eh? Ah well, it was bound to happen in any case.
A pity we lost a page of discussion, as I think that's where my misunderstanding has come from...I thought there were two linked issues here, Cathar's concern over the need to cool micro-hotspots on the core (OC being the tool to measure success at such), and an epiphany he'd had regarding a way to ease his difficulties in manufacturing. Did I see a distintction where there was none? Or was I just unclear about which of Cathar's comments I was referring to?

Originally Posted by Cathar

The lessons learned here will fold back into a design I've drawn up for a far easier to machine Cascade II, which will sacrifice some of the bleeding-edge machining tolerances of the XS in order to create a balanced block that should be very near as good

Did I misinterpret the context of this statement?

edit: Ignore me, questions answered by the man himself below.

[Cathar]

Originally Posted by Jabo

I keep following developments and when I see actual figures I begin to wonder if diminishing returns point was passed some time ago? All the energy and time and $$$$ spent on Cascade SS and super small tube sizes.... is the improvement substantial enough to justyfi it? Don't get me wrong here, I don't want to be a party pooper but I like to ask such questions

Believe me, the thought crosses my mind too. At some point (economical) rationality does leave the stage, but such is true of various motor sports as well. For example, one can buy a stock Yamaha R1 motorbike, stick a custom exhaust pipe and slicks on it for ~$15000US, and set lap times around a race track that come within 10% as fast as what would be achievable with a ~$500000 fully factory kitted SuperBike. Like Bill says about the Ford/Ferrari thing.

Originally Posted by Jabo

It remided me of another thread about Cathar's blocks here on procooling. I reminded me of this thread bacause drawing showed on this calculator page neatly supported my suggestion for improvemnt of jet type block - designing out stagnation zones while at the same time increasing surface area and jet pressure by decreasing&modelling cross sectional water jet area.
This would allow for bigger diameter jets, fewr ot them, cheaper (shorter) CNC and higher stress durability.

This is precisely something that I'm exploring. I will state something here though. The jet-in-a-cup principle has similar premises to the free-jet model, but overall the convectional area offered by the surface of the cup wall cannot be ignored.

Larger jets with more fully developed convectional activity at the base of the cup comes at the expense of larger cups. The further the walls move away from the jet (in a ratio sense) results in a increase of the ratio of "conduction distance to convectional surface area". i.e. the net convectional efficiency may get improved at the base of the cup, but we lose out double time on the walls as the water velocity there will be slower, and the heat has to move further up the walls to engage the same convectional area.

So again there's the balance. The principle of the Cascade somewhat sacrifices maximum convectional efficiency at the base of the cup, but attempts to make up for this by placing the jets at a distance that maximises the Nusselt number in the stagnation region immediately under the jet. This (smallish) loss then gets made up in the cup walls. The smaller the cups (and the smaller the jets as a result) the less distance the heat needs to travel up the cup walls. The smaller the cups in comparison to the jets (to a point) the greater the walled surface area that gets engaged for the same vertical distance from the CPU, and the greater the rate of convection due to increased water velocity (which decreases with radial distance from the jet).

That's the basics of the "constrained jet behavior" that I've been looking at. It does have some similarities to free-jet behavior, but overall I feel that they are actually quite different in terms of what configurations work best for either.

Still, this won't stop me from trying this second, more easy to machine prototype based upon more standard free-jet principles, but while using slightly larger jets, this actually leads to a significantly more restrictive block due to significantly less jets (which is not desirable except for those with well-above-average pumps), and indeed to shrink the free-jet design down to a point where the walls are effectively working in a similar fashion to the Cascade approach, the jets are now even smaller than they would have been on the Cascade, leading to an super-restrictive block.

[Les]

gruntledweasel
Cathar(Foster) sometimes guesses wrongly.

[Cathar]

Originally Posted by Les

Cathar(Foster)

Cathar(Forster)

It'd be nice to get it perfect first time, every time.

[Les]

Originally Posted by Cathar

Cathar(Forster)

It'd be nice to get it perfect first time, every time.

Apologize for the wrong name.
Thought it was Foster, my family name is Round.

[Cathar]

Originally Posted by Les

Apologize for the wrong name.
Thought it was Foster, my family name is Round.

I wasn't sure on the initial comment. Was unaware of your surname, and what I could have been mine was mis-spelled. I was wondering if you were referring to some British commentary panel show or something where 3 guys sit behind a desk and talk shit, but sometimes show a modicum of wit.

Then again, that's probably exactly the meaning you were conveying, just that it wasn't some British TV show.

[BillA]

lol
the 3 techno stooges
gotta love it

[Les]

In Wigan we play RL.

[Les]

Originally Posted by Cathar

I wasn't sure on the initial comment. Was unaware of your surname, and what I could have been mine was mis-spelled. I was wondering if you were referring to some British commentary panel show or something where 3 guys sit behind a desk and talk shit, but sometimes show a modicum of wit.

Then again, that's probably exactly the meaning you were conveying, just that it wasn't some British TV show.

Perhaps refering to "Doctor Foster went to Gloucester"

[AngryAlpaca]

Why did you choose this baseplate thickness? What's stopping you from using a thicker one?

[Cathar]

Originally Posted by AngryAlpaca

Why did you choose this baseplate thickness? What's stopping you from using a thicker one?

An increased cost of conduction is why. As Les's graphs illustrate, when the rate of convection get significantly above 50000W/m²K, base-plate thicknesses below 2mm are pretty much required to get the most out of the design - eventually the copper starts to get in the way. The higher the rate of thermal convection immediately above the CPU die, the less the lateral thermal spread, until eventually all the copper is doing is just getting in the way, rather than actually aiding in any significant fashion.

[Cathar]

Okay, picked up the replacement XS middle plate two days ago. The replacement plate was machined out of Delrin, and it turned out excellently. Delrin is wonderful stuff for machining, the only drawbacks being that it is not a clear plastic. Still, it does come in black, so a waterblock made from black Delrin would have the appearance of those cool looking black Sony Playstation CD's.

That's all just modding fluff though.

Comparing the copper prototype XS to the Cascade SS (Silver-based modified Cascade).

Now I've picked up a motherboard that reads the on-die diode from the AthlonXP CPU's. The drawback to this is that the temperatures being reported are pretty low, probably about half of what I would've expected to see, and keep roughly in proportion to the sorts of values that Phaestus is seeing in his test-bed.

Using the radiators I've been able to determine that the CPU under the test load conditions is dumping approximately 120W into the cooling loop, but the CPU temperatures are being reported as around 7-8.5C above the water temperatures, which is plainly ludicrous, and should at least be twice that. So much for on-die diode accuracy...

Okay, so using the on-die diode and overclocking stability to "measure" waterblock performance, it goes roughly like this:

AthlonXP @ 2.66GHz/2.2v running Prime95 Torture Test with fixed highest-heat-load test pattern. Prime95TT is not as heat-heavy as BurnK7, but for this particular test CPU, BurnK7 will cause the system to reboot at anything over 2.55GHz, which is pointless for overclock stability testing.

Okay, the results after a number of test runs. Basically reporting the best achieved result. Most runs were either at or just below the following figures.

Cascade SS - 52 jet-tube, silver base-plate
~8.5C CPU rise above water
peak stable 1hr overclock 2685MHz @ 2.2v & 26.0C water temperature

Cascade XS - 149 jet-tube, copper base-plate
~8.0C CPU rise above water
peak stable 1hr overclock 2690MHz @ 2.2v & 26.0C water temperature

The 0.5C difference here probably equates to a 1C difference in reality, but I can't be sure of that given my equipment. That's purely a guess.

Made in silver, the XS would probably offer another 0.5C performance increase, and probably another 5MHz or so. The temperature results are not wholly unexpected, however I was somewhat hoping for a better overclock.

Ordinarily I probably would've proceeded to get a silver XS base-plate made-up, but then a dark horse rode in from over the stormy horizon...

[trit187]

hmmm... don't think you're going to break on this one, but how about droping some hints about that p2, i don't think it has been mentioned on this forum yet.

with the delrin is the xs looking like a viable option? or are you going to scrap it and focus on the p2?