[Incoherent]

I am going to go out on a limb.

Why are we even discussing this?
I have been considering whether or not to embark on a series of tests on a die simulator where I attempt to characterise waterblock behaviour with an IHS.
After having read this thread I am hesitant to do this, I believe the exercise to be futile. Putting a heat spreader on top of a CPU die with a waterblock on top is exactly the same as putting a Heat spreader under a waterblock with a CPU die underneath.
The point of that statement, stupid as it is, is to illustrate that you can turn any high performance waterblock into a complete dog by putting crap in the heatpath. There are lots of analogies. A thoroughbred racehorse will beat shire horse around a racetrack. But not if you have it pulling a heavy cart through mud. This community only deals with unimpeded racehorses as far as I am concerned. The business of cargo transport is a whole other industry, that which I think Swiftech is moving towards with the Apogee. ie general, reliable, sustainable and above all economical. No-one breeds racehorses for cargo transport.

In my world, using an IHS capped CPU for performance should not even be considered. The whole basis for my testing is and always has been to establish performance levels that would enable me to build the best block I possibly could. Having spent time building waterblocks, or money buying waterblocks, or effort designing waterblocks, WTF would I render that irrelevant by hitching up a cart to the racehorse?

This is Procooling, it's always been about the overclock at the end of the day, that's what the watercooling community started from. Leaving an IHS on is not what we are about. Waterblocks designed to adequately cool an IHS capped CPU are another market entirely, potentially a much bigger one, and the right way to go for Swiftech IMO from a purely economical standpoint.

I am going to stick to testing, using a small heat die in some form, because I believe that that best represents a small UNCAPPED, CPU die. Despite the concerns of whether it fully represents a real CPU I believe it to be the only reliable way to establish waterblock performance. Because the conditions in a heatdie a are known and if the setup is known it can be modelled. If it can be modelled then absolute performance can be established from real data.

I refuse to believe this is not possible.

And I am not talking about data only valid for one testbench, I am talking about absolute performance which would be reproducable in any other testbench where the the conditions are known. In a TTV they are not (at least by me), In a real CPU they are not, and you haven't a hope in hell of knowing the conditions in an IHS capped CPU.


P.S. Ben. I also refuse to believe that performance is dependent on power level in a die simulator. If it is the calibration is out. In fact I think that this effect is a way of verifying the calibration of the temperature sensors. Take temperature readings at different power levels, plot a curve dT water-Sensor vs Watts, extrapolate a linear down to 0W. If dT for all sensors is not zero at this point, you need to recalibrate.