It makes sense that the best performing blocks with smaller pumps would have smaller fittings. This increases water velocity as it goes into the block and improves heat transfer from lowering the size of the boundary layer. That doesnt mean that these blocks are universally best, however, as other blocks may be designed for bigger pumps and more pressure.
That was exactly my point with Birrman. I see no mention of temperature measuring, number of replicates, testing parameters.
I have a few blocks here I will be testing too:
Center Inlet "maze type"
Maze2
Spir@l
sysfx dual channel
Die Area Impingement
Swiftech MCW462U
Swiftech MCW462UH
Others
Innovatek rev3
Heatkiller 1.5
That really doesn't say much about the quality of the final results though does it?
Yea science and proper analysis procedures break down ALL the time. Perhaps we REALLY need to be asking our ministers which blocks to use?
Your example is actually consistent with my statements as well. Inproper testing methods don't always yield useful results. Please find me an example of where thermodynamics breaks down. An example (from the life sciences) that would be more consistent with what I am talking about would be the observation that pharmaceutical development times and efficiency have been dramatically reduced since the 80s when biochemistry really became a popular science. Chemists and biologists began to elucidate enzymatic pathways and fundamentally understood how they work and where they are going wrong in sick people. This let them target particular pathways with drug therapy, and greatly accelerate the whole R&D process. The same thing is needed here. You will never understand heat transfer and fluid movement and the important design variables with your approach. Without that understanding the improvement of overall systems will be slow and fraught with misinformation (lets just inject this into rats and see what happens?).
A few weeks of thought in designing an experiment can save you a few months of testing; figure out what your questions really are and then focus your studies on getting to that. To me, the goal would be to educate readers in heat transfer and to provide test results that are useful in mixing and matching a good performing complete setup or in building a good custom block. You can't get there (easily) by testing just a whole bunch of complete kits; there are too many variables. Consider the variable pressure production of different pumps of approximately the same GPH rating. This will influence the performance of the setup and in particular the need to move to larger fittings to try and lower the resistance and get higher flow to a block. If you have pressure drop information on the blocks as well as temp, then you can try to match a block to the pump you are using. Many people (myself included) like to cool in smaller cases and so pump choices are limited. Case size also limits radiator choice somewhat and that will also affect block choice. I choose fans based upon manufacturer supplied curves all the time without needing to put them in my case first to "test" them. I don't understand why water cooling equipment is any different, other than the fact that the manufacturers don't (can't? won't?) provide that data so testers need to generate it themselves.
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