How big a market are we, anyway?
 

I just bought a couple of heatercores for a '71 Mercury Montego and got to thinking - are there more PC-watercooling folks buying 6x6 heater cores than there are '71 Mercury Montegos on the road?
Maybe we're big enough that we might rate being a heatercore "model" to some company (like transpro or fedco)?
BillA - without giving away any company secrets, have you folks at least thought of this? I'd much prefer to be giving my heater-core money to a company that's going to use at least a tiny bit of it for waterblock R&D. :)
I'd really like something like a 6x7 straight-through core, tanks on the short side, non diagonal waterflow, so it could go in the lower front of a FS020 or Chieftech with minimal case mods and no problems with air pockets "in the field".
Reducing air resistance to the point that axial fans are no longer an inappropriate solution would be nice, too - which means, hmmm... thinner? un-corrugated cross fins? something else? Nothing that would make it an out-of-the-ordinary heater core as far as the manufacturing process was concerned.
Bob

About 12 daily visitors to Procooling. Looks like the split is something like 6 regulars and then a revolving 6 people from some other website that we've pissed off.

Bob
the market is too fragmented (small) to justify the quantities needed
and
the mfgrs are often whores
let one vendor shoulder the market/product development costs, then sell that same product to everyone else

not much economic incentive
I have a variety of 'better' rad designs - but no one to build them who will protect my market

"I'd much prefer to be giving my heater-core money to a company that's going to use at least a tiny bit of it for waterblock R&D."

you may be a population of one who expresses that thought in the marketplace

who is doing R&D ? gimme a list

the 'luxury' of R&D comes with economies of scale,
now we will see the onslaught of larger cos who have a budget for R&D, advertising, and loss-leader pricing to capture market share

bad times for small mfgrs

:D and jayd116 wants to $30,000 CNC mill to become one, bad move? ;)

More than likely, but the time he will have with it will be so action packed and fun filled :D Oh, and CNC machines dont lose value very fast, so I'll be he could sell it when hes done and make most of his money back.

No, no, no... Water coooling stuff will be the "busy work" while I do other things with the mill. I expected to make less than $1000 a month in water cooling stuff. I can easily pay the mill off with my regular job. Would much rather have a good CNC mill than a new vehicle. Price is about the same for both.

EDIT: All the reaserch I have been doing actually shows computer modding and water cooling (basicaly anything after market) slowing down. The main thing that is making this happen is the larger companies are now selling pre-modded computer cases and not to many people are mechanical enough to install a WC system or simply don't want to. People want WC'ing to go mainstream but if it does it will kill off a lot of business for people like Danger Den and D-Tek as they will not be able to afford to stay in bussiness from much cheaper stuff from bigger companies.

look at the automotive aftermarket
adapt and survive,
could not apply more to thermal management

I had thought that that was what Swiftech has been up to. There's been a progression of better and better blocks.
Oh - right, there's the whole issue of what you consider to be R&D. I am considering some of your time designing, testing, thinking to be R&D, all be it on a very small scale. Maybe you're thinking of a fully staffed lab...?

If it works the way the software business has, they will also have budget to buy the smaller companies - which is not necessarily a bad thing if your're a principal, and budget to pay engineers a reasonable salary (you're now part of a revenue stream and should get compensated based on that). Sadly, they will eventually have budget to move development to India :( and manufacturing to China :(

Long term (10 years) I woudn't be surprised if they figure out how to grow baseplates out of diamond - or for that mater, use diamond as a substrate and grow the cooling surface right into that. It looks as though Intel is running into a "heat wall" already - AMD not yet, but they've taken more of a CISC route (oh - Engineer - you knew that anyway) and necessity is the mother...
Disregard this last paragraph if you think K. Eric Drexler's an idiot.
Come to think of it, disregard this whole post if you think I'm an idiot :)

I'm considering starting the manufacture of waterblocks over the coming years, though this would be a sideline to the work I have planned for the facilities I will be setting up.

I see it as gaining experience on the machines doing something I enjoy, but I don't expect it to make anything like as much money as the main business.

I'll be making blocks as time allows, when the machines aren't in use doing proper work.

8-ball

Bob
believe me, Swiftech is quite into R&D - we do what we can, ~80% of my time

this is not a slam at 8-Ball, but read his post
8-Ball I'm sure can design a good wb, and he will mfg it on 'dead' machining time (ck out Silverprop for the exact same business model)
and this is fine and proper for 8-Ball

but every such one decreases the potential revenue stream -> of which R&D may get a part
and some numbers are significant, I need a wind tunnel @ $12K
some things are difficult to poor-boy

That's what you get for messing w/ heat pipes instead of proper water cooling.

Say what ever happened to that setup JoeC got for measruing actual airflow through heatsinks and radiators? 'Twas a very cool idea (never saw much come from it though)

JoeC was/is using Andrew LeMont's equip for that
Millennium Thermal is close to Joe

lets NOT hear about preferential treatment to MT

A typical business move at this point would be to try to get into some kind of partnership, to incorporate, for example, a DangerDen water block with one of the top end PC manufacturers: power by association, grab the market where it is.

A whole different ballgame at this point.

Have a friend who discussed custom made heater-cores with a factory who makes them here in Australia (Denso). Basically if the run size is less than around 10000 units then they're not really interested, and this is in a country with a relatively small car market.

With heater-cores it's typically a case of just piggy-backing onto a run of suitably sized cores. There may be smaller "boutique" manufacturers who are willing to entertain batch sizes starting at the 1000 mark, but you'd have to go out of your way to find them. In the USA I would imagine that it would be very hard to find a heater-core maker that considered anything less than a run of 10000 cores as being worth their while.

Let's face it, computer water cooling really does exist purely as a side-note to other far more profitable industries enabling it to be cost-justifiable. If the heater-cores, industrial/aquarium/auto mag-drive pumps, and the CNC machine centers didn't already exist to service other major industries, computer water-cooling would still be in the back yard with guys with drill-presses and dremels turning out stuff for their system.

Bill brings up another very good point though, and something which is gutting the computer water-cooling industry, and that is compounded by the small size of the industry. For there to be any major advances in terms of purpose built items, there needs to be considerable R&D and investment setup costs for such to happen.

Problem is that most of the players out there seem to be quite happy to hunt down and grab at whatever technology is developed by others to turn into their own (small) profit without actually paying for the R&D themselves. Thus, any stronger players are immediately dragged back down again by shouldering the bulk of the burden of development and establishment costs, without receiving adequate financial reward for such.

Truly, the commercial water-cooling industry is like a pack of skinny starving jackals fighting each other for the left-over scraps of the automobile industry, happy to gnaw voraciously on each other's legs if it means a few more morsels of food in their anorexic stomaches.

The only way out of this scenario is if the water-cooling market becomes mainstream enough such that there is enough for all the players to eat well (jackals included), but it is unlikely that many of the current players will retain any form of market dominance once the real big boys (Dell, IBM, HP, etc) step in and start dictating terms for how the mainstream water cooling market will play out.

In that scenario, it will have to be a case of "partner or perish", because once water-cooling goes truly main-stream as dictated by the big-boys, the bulk of the justification for the water-cooling market as it exists today evaporates.

I don't see why a large business would partner with a small one. The small one has nothing to offer and would just increase overhead. Only way it would work is if the large business bought out the small business and just used it's well established name.

Also on the heater cores, my buddy works for a small heat exchanger outfit as a design engineer. I asked him about a design for PC cases and said I would have to buy at least 1,000 and the cost would be around $60-$90 each and performance wouldn't be any better than whats already out there. he said they could sub it out to a larger company and drop the price to around $40-$60 each but I would have to get 10,000 minimum.

You can get a single custom made one from a high performance manufacturer like serck, proform or perma-cool but expect to pay a pretty penny for a one time shot.

HWLabs offered to make a "Procooling" edition Black Ice radiator: 2x 120mm fans, larger shroud thickness, single pass opposite side 3/8" FNPT. I don't think many of us would actually PAY more than $25 for a radiator though so I didnt really follow up on it :)

Personally I wouldn't pay more than $25. Considering their just dolled up heatercores and that's being generous. Now if they increased the performance or usability of their rad compared to the normal heatercore, then I'd be willing to dish out $60 - $100 for a rad.

All the "big names" seem to focus on silence and room, and less on performance. Do you think they will ever catch up to swiftech/dangerden performance? Since this doesnt seem quite as profitable a market and they can always spin performance differences, they all seem to focus on ease and 5 year no maintenance, etc.

That's an option, but because the product is still considered as "risky", that investment is really not likely to happen. One thing's for sure, Swiftech is in a far better position to be gobbled up than DangerDen is.

A partnership would see, let's make up an example here, Dell come out with a high end workstation that includes water cooling. As you might already realize, Dell already knows how many of these they're going to produce, even before they produce the very first one, so the call comes out for a water cooling kit. At this point, they can either develop the WC kit themselves, which would probably have us all here laughing into next week, or partner up with a company like Swiftech, with their new MCW-6002, and build a (Swiftech sanctionned) kit right into the box, and let Swiftech enjoy a bit of publicity, a massive one time sale of blocks, even for minimal profit, if any, because it's going to begin mainstreaming water cooling for everybody, and boost their sales far above everyone else, and HP makes headlines around the world, again.

Like I said, a whole different ballgame.

Certainly a possibility, but if they are going to partner with someone it will be a much larger company IMO. What would probably happen is they would make it a bidding process. Which ever company can come up with the best options would win. I doubt Swiftech has the capability to take on the larger cooling companies (which most likely already have a water cooling plan in mind). Probably names we we don't even know like Shenzhen Renhai Electronics Co., Ltd.

Also: http://www.titan-cd.com/english/A04.asp

http://www.enertron-inc.com/Default.htm

Possible, but it's pretty obvious that Swiftech has concentrated their efforts that way, and I really don't see anyone bigger, except for those foreign OEM manufacturers, indeed.

Anything could happen, it's just a matter of time. It's probably going to start with high end machines, or servers, as long as the reliability can be demonstrated. We all know how to make it reliable, but "they" need to know, and to see the "numbers". I'm sure Bill's somewhat involved there too.

The interesting thing is that the water block market would then shift, as stated earlier, from an enthusiast market to a mainstrean OEM one, at which point it'll probably end up coming from overseas.

The numbers are definitely there. If in the example above, Dell decided to build say 10'000 of these "special edition" workstations, it wouldn't be terribly difficult to contract out the manufacturing, even for Swiftech, and still turn in a decent price.

But all in all, I don't see the mainstream extending into regular workstations until Intel and/or AMD get in on this water cooling.

From what I can tell, Swiftech do already produce cooling solutions for large orders, on an oem basis.

They're probably the only company of the ones we are familiar with that could go down this route.

8-ball