haha, classic; its the block in my avatar, incidentally
Its a 1/2" barb design with a center washer 'jet plate' (ie, washer soldered on, dremeled straight cut) with 3mm holes connected with roughly 1mm channels; extremely similar to the lumpy channel, but only after i saw pH's review of it that i knew; I didnt think the bypasses could be 'too big'?

in saying that, this is performing differently to my old design (this ones better at lower flows, but levels off faster), but i attributed that to my thicker base plate (x2 thickness)
I'll stop before this gets into a discussion about block design... HOWEVER, ive run heaps more complicated solidmodels on way worse hardware than this, to get back OT; I dont know why everyone thinks you need a 1000$ card to run a programme like solidworks :shrug:
Something like
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...108696089&rd=1
work?