Quote:
Originally posted by satanicoo
this is another thing that i'm not understanding, isn't the area for the water to pass the same? ( 10x lower area per channel, but 10x more channels)
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I should've stated that I was referring to a balanced design.
With the mini/micro-channel blocks, fin height is optimally between 4-5x of the channel width. Heat won't travel up the fins in any significant fashion past 4x high, except at really low (<2lpm) flow rates where at 5x high is possibly a better balance.
Making the channels and fins 10x thinner, but keeping them at the same height as in the White Water, would result in 90% of the water flowing through the block not doing anything.
Making the fins a balanced height would result in a block that's 10x more restrictive than the White Water, and offer about 6mm^2 of orifice area for the water to flow through. This added exit restriction would also stop the impingement region forming properly (if at all), so you can see that there really is a balance going on here. As you keep making the channels smaller and smaller, you're actually interfering with one of the aspects that makes the White Water design work well. In essence you're making a strict micro-channel block, but now have to work super hard with the pump to make use of it.
So the White Water design really does have a lower bound on how far you can go with reducing the channels before it effectively stops being a "White Water" design and merely becomes a micro-channel design with a central inlet. I do have a very good idea of what is truly optimal for the design, but the current design is very close to that point anyway, and the performance differences really would be minor (~0.5C on a hot CPU) for a large increase in machining time and cost, and that is the other main factor in water-block design - how cheap can it be done? All well and good making a one-off that takes many hours to make up, but it'd cost hundreds of US dollars if you ever wanted to produce it.