You guys deserve an update

[pHaestus]

Work has been kicking my ass this week but grant season is over and the fruit of my toiling is in the competent (I hope) hands of "Fedex overnight next am delivery". I have graduate students in the lab now doing the bulk of the research and so that (in theory) leaves me with more free time at night to work on the site. I am doing my dead lavel best to have that Matrix Orbital MX4 review up tonight and then the #rotor block review posted shortly thereafter.

Re: wb reviews.
I had to flush my test system out over the weekend. I used airspirit's pine sol/lysol/heat mixture and it worked very well. It seems the hydrothruster shuts off if water temperatures are too high though...took me a bit to figure that one out. I brought a big jug to work today to score some RO water and I will fill the test loop again tonight and let all the electronics warm up and stabilize overnight. I am testing blocks in the following order:

Original LR Whitewater (plumbed in now)
Aquajoe (gotta finish modding this bastard to use same springs as other blocks)
Jaydee's blocks (dammit man don't send 4 you are killing me!)

I'll catch you guys later; meetings all day today at work (joy)

[joemac]

Originally Posted by pHaestus

Jaydee's blocks (dammit man don't send 4 you are killing me!)

He only sent four

[Tempus]

lol. I'm sure he has a few more if you ask nicely.

[KnightElite]

Excellent pH. Looking forward to seeing them.

[pHaestus]

Yes it'll be nice to get up and running again.

[Joe]

hehe with the lack of an update They musta thought I took the site back over hehehehe

[jaydee]

Originally Posted by pHaestus

It seems the hydrothruster shuts off if water temperatures are too high though...took me a bit to figure that one out.

Remember all the problems I had with mine? Same situation. What happened with mine is the impellor actually locks up when the water temp gets to hot. The motor stays running though and gets hotter than a pistol. I finally gave up on the damn thing and now am using a VIA 2600 untill I get something better.

Jaydee's blocks (dammit man don't send 4 you are killing me!)

Bad news. I got a 5th just about ready and it will have 3 tops with a different configuration for the jet(s) in each top. This is the Project X block. Fear not though I will not send it untill the others are done.

[BillA]

and the pursuit of equip ?
chiller
pressure transducer(s)

[pHaestus]

The chiller I bit the bullet and had the ebay unit that ended up in Louisiana crated and it will be shipped to me early next week. Still cheaper retail I guess.

[pHaestus]

Ok so you might be curious as to what I have going on now. I am in the middle of testing out the original Little River Whitewater, but I ran into some technical difficulties I have to deal with. Not sure why but the test system freaked out last night and refused to even power on for a while (it would shut off after 1 second like there was a short). I pulled out the modded Tbred CPU, replaced with a Duron, and it worked just fine. Then when I reinserted the Tbred it worked fine but CPU temperatures were much higher than before with same wb. I am guessing that somehow there was a short that maybe affected diode calibration? I'm going to run the CPU diode calibration in a water bath again tomorrow along with all of my digitec temp probes and hopefully sort it all out. Too bad too because my std deviation on delta T was under 0.1C for the first 5 mounts (I was stunned!)

In the next week I'll post: #rotor waterblock review and Swiftech MCWChill review. And as soon as I can get everything recalibrated I'll have a "dtek vs LR Whitewater" comparison, an Aquajoe wb review, and try to get at the performance of Jaydee's wbs. Anyway I thought I'd keep you guys in the loop.

[bigben2k]

Sounds like you're mastering the TIM application! Excellent! Got any tips?

[pHaestus]

It's almost purely a function of doing it repeatedly. The "BillA goop" helps too

[BillA]

Originally Posted by pHaestus

It's almost purely a function of doing it repeatedly. The "BillA goop" helps too

not quite
the key is the measurement techinque that enables a correlation between cause and effect
hell, the practice part is easy

[pHaestus]

I got the test system working again. The culprit for all my problems was the system's PSU. It's reporting 4.6V for the +5V, and the +5V also goes to the MAX6655. I connected the Maxim reader to a psu that outputs more reasonable voltages and all is now well. The system behaving like it had a short and the repeated clicking of the hdd make more sense now too. Anyway I hopefully can keep making progress with testing and have some good stuff for you guys this week.

[pHaestus]

http://phaestus.procooling.com/wws.jpg

HUGE grain of salt here. I am going to remount the DTek block and retest over next few days. Clearly my testing is becoming more reproducible though. Error bars just keep on getting shorter and shorter

[gruntledweasel]

Originally Posted by pHaestus

HUGE grain of salt here.

Er, why? Probes not calibrated yet? Even at the extremes of possible error, it seems to me like a difference in performance has been established.

[pHaestus]

Mostly because the system has been sitting idle for over a month and I did have some issues over the weekend. With my consistency in mounting reps improving continuously as well, it's possible that some of the earlier blocks might do a little better than posted. I'll rerun the DTek again and we'll know either way. In a perfect world it'll fall right on the same line as before but with a smaller error bar.

[nikhsub1]

Originally Posted by pHaestus

Mostly because the system has been sitting idle for over a month and I did have some issues over the weekend. With my consistency in mounting reps improving continuously as well, it's possible that some of the earlier blocks might do a little better than posted. I'll rerun the DTek again and we'll know either way. In a perfect world it'll fall right on the same line as before but with a smaller error bar.

Hmm, that is bizarre, seems by that run the OG WW is at or outperforming the Cascade.... hard to tell without horizontal lines in the graphs, but a 2GPM the WW is at around 9 (detla-t) as is the Cascade...

[pHaestus]

I may have to replace the PSU in the testbed rather than just use a secondary unit for powering the MAX6655. It could be that the VCore is sagging a bit too and so heat load is slightly less. Anyway it'll fall out when I retest DTek WW again. Business dinners Monday and Wednesday night so I probably won't do anything other than replumb the DTek block tonight

[pauldenton]

Originally Posted by gruntledweasel

Er, why? Probes not calibrated yet? Even at the extremes of possible error, it seems to me like a difference in performance has been established.

hmm - well if there is then i guess the LRWW i bought wasn't as extravagent as i thought....

could hand lapping by Cathar rather than Dtek's lapping be the cause maybe?