[Cathar]

Originally Posted by Etacovda

http://www.bwdesign.orcon.net.nz/wb2/Assem1.avi
Uses Xvid codec - I recommend VLC player (for everything actually, not just this avi)

Not what i envisaged (actually, i think this would perform worse, and has been suggested before) but it may get an idea rolling for you. Obviously not the full jets are shown, nor is that the full block base size; actually, the only reason im putting this up is because i said i would, i believe its next to useless.

Hmmm - jetting down onto the tops of the pins where the heat is furthest away from the CPU. Seems to me that what you presented there expends most of its jet energy cooling the wrong spot. Interesting idea I guess.

WRT your jet testing, will less jets focused in the right places make for better cooling due to the velocity? The images you've show still show what appears to be quite a number of jets (more than the cascade, even?)

Would having less result in more water velocity, or have you increased the velocity to as high as you're able to (from what you've said, it seems so)

In my testing I strove for a balance point of pressure drop vs velocity vs cooling contact patch. The Storm block cools almost twice the area of the Cascade block's main contact patch. I did this mostly because it didn't affect jet velocity (in any significant fashion) to do so across a broad range of centrifugal pumping scenarios. i.e. if I had halved the number of jets and the main cooling contact area, overall jet velocity would not have increased by more than 5% for the remaining jets when given the same centrifugal pump (and for certain lower pressure pumps such as Eheims would increase by not more than 1-2%), but block restrictiveness would have doubled. Therefore it made sense to me to simply use that to best advantage and cool as large an area as could be supported without sacrificing jet velocity.

One thing which has not been lost on me in the design of this block is the almost uncanny symbiosis I'm seeing between typical CPU die sizes, and centrifugal pumping characteristics when pumping water. i.e. the design, coupled with the pump, lends itself to being optimised around cooling an area that just so happens to be about perfectly sized for cooling CPU dies and the sizes that they are. While the design could be scaled to much larger areas (like a 50x50mm TEC for example), we would start to lose some of the very nice balance between pump/pressure/patch.

After looking at a die size, and the area of heat that it creates, the size of a key on a keyboard (14x14ish) should create enough cooling to let the rest be cooled by the outflow, would it not?

IMO for focused cooling patch designs, if more than 10% of the total heat flux is being dissipated in areas outside of the main cooling patch, then the design is flawed (for that application). For that 10% or less, this amount of heat can be very easily "mopped up" by the most basic of "outflow" effects due to the relatively large metal convectional surface area that it is encountering. Even here though I did spend some effort on ensuring that the outflow was being fairly well used to assist in cooling the metal outside of the main cooling patch.