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Originally Posted by jaydee116
No where, that's the problem. Looking for ideas on what direction to go.... I have no spacific intrest in any one part of it. I just want to find one part of it that would be most useful for everyone here at ProCooling and stay on track with it. What part that is I am not sure.
What are people most interested in here?
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Some ideas that have been at the fore-front of my mind, and they've all had some good progress:
1) Waterblock design (as always) - getting pretty damn close to a wall here at the upper end of the flow rate/pressure supply range (for pumps that aren't ridiculous in size/power), but there really are substantial gains to go for
everyone to improve lower pressure/flow performance. This will go a LONG way towards facilitating even smaller (8mm or 5/16" ID) tubing use such that the performance trade-offs for using such are very minimal while allowing for easier routing in-case.
2) Radiator design - The Thermochill PA160 is the culmination of a lot of ideas already discussed here at Procooling and that's about to hit the scene. A joint effort radiator design that marries low-noise fan use, compactness and fairly easy in-case installability. Improvements from here on would be slowly incremental in nature. There's still some ways to go, and lots of testing, and if everyone helped out here in some way it'd be great.
3) Pump advances - we've all seen some really excellent advances here. The latest
actually quiet Laing D4's with the speed adjustable knobs on the back that accept from 8v-24v input, and at 12v match the old D4's but without all the noise are a tremendous leap in the right direction. The Iwaki RD-30 quite possibly still remains the king of the heap, but with these latest D4's it's no longer a one-horse show. The Laing DDC also remains as an excellent choice - fix the inlet issue and it would quite possibly be the pump that "has it all" when size is taken into account.
4) Chilled water use - there are a number of exciting opportunities here. I have a very cheap to make prototype here that could fit in a CD-ROM bay, and am co-ordinating with an electronics whizz-kid to provide for dew-point temperature management while being powered from a regular PC PSU. There are other approaches and other designs out there on the market as well, but there's lot of work to do to produce something that is capable of chilling water with a good COP in a compact area. Targetting such a goal drives water-cooling's viability as keeping far ahead of anything that air/heat-pipe cooling can achieve.
In a computing world whereby top-end CPU's are increasingly bin-split according to ability to run stably at higher speeds, and charged accordingly, the ability to sneak some solution in there which enables a cheaper low-end CPU to easily surpass the speed of a higher end CPU for less noise than the stock cooling solution on that higher-end CPU produces, and for less cost keeps that side of the market alive.
With multi-cored CPU's and CPU manufacturers increasingly focusing on thermal-management within the CPU dies to run CPU's part-time at their full speed when possible, a thermal cooling solution that enables full-time full-speed is still a worth-while goal within the community.
Where it gets dicey, as always, is with the ability to do it all cost-effectively and cost-justifiably for the mass-market. Sadly, this is something that DIY'ers will never be able to achieve.