The "Cascade" - mini-cup directed jet-impingement block design (56K warn)

[Since87]

Originally posted by CNYC
something that could be used by Dell or Gateway and something an enthusiast would be happy having in his system.

You realize you are talking about two completely different things here, right?

[Cathar]

Originally posted by CNYC
Hi Cathar,

Is your relationship with DTEK exclusive or are you open to producing variants of the WW block you created? Looks like I might have missed a great opportunity if its an exclusive.

I would hope that you make a great profit from the time you spent designing the block.

I really am looking to get deep into watercooling since I think the timing is right. Do you think you can produce a lower cost, one inlet one outlet design? What do you think about silver plating a block? (I know a factory that can do silver plating very inexpensively)

I would like to take watercooling products (all in one unit(s) and waterblocks) to the mainstream; something that could be used by Dell or Gateway and something an enthusiast would be happy having in his system.

Andrew

Hi Andrew,

I won't discuss my relationship with DTek, other than to say that with respect to the White Water, it's pretty much exclusive. I am involved in ongoing development of the White Water design with them, which includes derivative variants to suit the needs of customers, either enthusiast or mainstream.

Silver-plating is a waste IMO. It's nothing more than a (literal) marketing shell. It does nothing for performance, but adds costs. If the base-plate were solid silver, then some value may be added, other than purely superficial in appearance.

[PoLicE]

Cathar,
I showed some CNC operators your prototype in the company I am working for. I have been told that "renting" a CNC machine capable for Cascade is possible here in Istanbul. To compare the labor/equipment costs in diff. countries I am sending you a PM.

[Cathar]

Originally posted by PoLicE
Cathar,
I showed some CNC operators your prototype in the company I am working for. I have been told that "renting" a CNC machine capable for Cascade is possible here in Istanbul. To compare the labor/equipment costs in diff. countries I am sending you a PM.

The prices you sent, after exchange rates, seem to be about the same as it costs here.

Remember, when I was saying the prices above, I was talking about walking off the street, cold, and getting a CNC shop to tool up and program up the CNC mill to make a block up. So you pay a large one-off cost to do that.

To give you an idea though, there's about 95-100 minutes of machine time and labour in each Cascade block from raw parts to a packaged block ready to go out the door, and on top of that you need to add the raw cost of the materials and ongoing tooling costs. The final price is about €75, which I think gives a fair indication that I'm serious when I say "It's not about the money".

[deepblue]

@cathar

as far as i know you've asked around for injection-modelling and got turned down. if i remember it right, the problem was getting the small "pipes" done.
i've been at a local company that does stereolithography for plastics and slm (selective laser melting). and they can produce any shape. even hollow parts, etc ... atm they're doing steel-samples of tools, or implants with the slm-machine. but, as the head-engineer, of the company told me they can use any metal. silver, gold, steel, titan and some chromalloys ...
and - as the manufacture - the machinery themselves and sell it across the globe, you might be lucky enough to find a shop in down under that uses just that kind of machine.

the way those machines is pretty simple. you send them a cad-model of the part you want done, and their software breaks it up into 0.1 mm slices. later the laserbit builds these layers one atop the other in a somewhat lengthy process .. the result is awesome! i've seen samples of what they do!

the only thing i don't know for sure yet is pricing. as they told me that they're doing a lot of this for smaller companies around here it can't be that expensive. the cool part about it is they can manufacture more than just one bit at a time - depending on the size, of course. so you could have 5 wb designs done at the same time and still get away pretty cheap.

i don't know, when exactly i'll meet them again - probably 2 or 3rd week of july, but then i'll asl for prices!

- this is just another means of producing those blocks, and maybe it's a cheaper alternative than having a cnc-shop do it...
regard

[PoLicE]

Originally posted by Cathar

Remember, when I was saying the prices above, I was talking about walking off the street, cold, and getting a CNC shop to tool up and program up the CNC mill to make a block up. So you pay a large one-off cost to do that.

Sure. Producing only one, two, ten pieces is bs. There are some fix costs in manufacture, for every type of product.

It was only for your information, I know what you mean.

[Cathar]

@ deep-blue

Yes, there are some stereo-lithography places here in Melbourne. I'll look into it some more and get some exact pricing, but they are primarily a prototyping mechanism, whereby something complex can be made up and evaluated, without resorting to the tool up costs of getting the prototype machined from scratch.

The process is relatively slow, taking a number of hours to form a piece. It's in the same league as EDM machining, that being an excellent and somewhat cheap way to get a prototype master made up, but it isn't exactly an effective form of mass-production.

If ever I wanted to produce the "be all - end all" of the Cascade design, it would be the process to use, but we're still talking about many hundreds of dollars, not tens of dollars per piece. ie. affordable prototyping (even for small companies), but not affordable mass-production.

[iggiebee]

Originally posted by Cathar
Remember, when I was saying the prices above, I was talking about walking off the street, cold, and getting a CNC shop to tool up and program up the CNC mill to make a block up. So you pay a large one-off cost to do that.

While surfing the Internet last night found the following site, and wonder if any of you have you tried the CAD/CAM online services offered by http://www.emachineshop.com ?.

The designs have to be performed using their (free) CAD software, that is also used to provide the cost estimate for the tooling. IMHO it seems to be a very useful service for those (like me) that can not afford CNC milling machine.

[Since87]

I've worked with some stereolithography made parts. The 'resolution' wasn't great and the parts had very obvious ridges on them. I don't know that SL is to the point of doing the fine detail of a cascade nozzle piece. Also the material used in the SL process is very brittle. The SL piece can sometimes be used to create a mold for casting epoxy or other plastics, but the quality of the results is not great.

[deepblue]

the machine that "grows" metals via laser-melting from some type of metal-powder (almost dust) did produce really fine and smooth surfaces. even round or ramp-type objects didn't have the "steps" you usally get from with the sl-process and plastics, so i guess that would solve a lot of problems...
it won't probably solve the price-prob but as they've shown me they are capable of doing 20x20 cm elements with their standard rig. maybe there's bigger sizes if they use a different base-plate.
and the process of laser-melting that powder is incredibly fast. it's really amazing seeing that little laserpoint tracing your objects..

[ozzy7750]

i have seen a couple of things made by slm, (althogh i thought it was called sls), andthey were perfect. they were small nosy pieces for baby incubators.

the problem being, that it took 6 hours to make it, and it was only about 2cm by 1cm big. It was dont in the US, the exchange rate worked out for it to be $NZ120,000 to make the tool. kinda out of budget for this project me thinks!!

but the cascade wont need large resolution like this tool needed, because there are no sloping surfaces, everything is vertical, it may be able to get done a lot faster

[mad mikee]

Are the amd cascades available for order to the US?:shrug:
Saw the info at the site but want to make sure and what do AU$ = in US$ Please (for now at least?) Just to get an idea?

Thanks MikeE

[Cathar]

Originally posted by mad mikee
Are the amd cascades available for order to the US?:shrug:
Saw the info at the site but want to make sure and what do AU$ = in US$ Please (for now at least?) Just to get an idea?

Thanks MikeE

In the pricing section of my site it links you to http://www.xe.com/ which is a universal currency converter.

[Cathar]

Well I hooked up this little bitty pump, which costs $9.95 AUD at Bunnings (NB: that's about $6.50 US). It's rated for 200LPH, and 53cm of pressure head, and draws 2.5W of power.



FYI, the Australian 20¢ piece is 28mm, or 1⅛", in diameter.

My test system consists of two Camry heater-cores in series, a sponge-type water filter, the Cascade block, two 1/2" sweeped copper elbows, and about 3m of tubing.

Due to the height differences in my test system, I had to use the Eheim 1250 to prime and bleed the system, and then swapped the pump intake over to the baby pump.

The resultant flow rate through the system was measured at 1.25lpm, which I actually thought was fairly impressive given the tiny size of the pump and the number of restrictions present that would not normally be in a tight water-cooling system. I'd estimate that the little pump would push maybe 1.5lpm in a less restrictive setup.

So how'd the Cascade go? Again, using the 2400MHz/1.85v test setting running BurnK7, the CPU rise over the water temperatures was an extra 4.0°C±0.5C°C over the Cascade system running at 10.5LPM.

Now the real margin of error might be more like ±1.5°C, so bear that in mind.

Still, running with the measured 4°C increase in CPU temperatures, these values are remarkably close to what the White Water sees as well but the Cascade is still cooling better than the White Water given these super-low flow rates, perhaps even handling the lower flow rates more gracefully than the White Water. I'd dearly love to get this independently verified because it throws a spanner into my assumptions of the performance of the block at lower flow rates. The Cascade really does perform quite well at low flow rates, but within my testing margins of error, I can't really be sure of what the full picture is, except to say that it's pretty close, but with the lead still being held by the Cascade.

Needless to say, the water also is significantly cooler than with the monster MD-30RZ adding heat to the system, so the actual CPU temperature increase over the MD-30RZ in relation to the ambient temperature is more like 3.0°C, which just goes to show again that bigger and stronger pumps aren't necessarily needed to yield decent results.

[Gulp35]

Cathar,

Do you have any pics of your setup? (I'm curious about your filter.)

[TerraMex]

I actually have one of those small pumps , which i used earlier for testing purposes but i wouldnt bet my system on it . For robustness and reliablity , my eheim 1048 takes the cake (and it's twice the size of the Aquael ).

Anyway, it is an interesting test but the target market doesnt usually use such low flow pumps. So i was wondering, are you thinking of other fittings for the Cascade? Something like the plug and cool , or Innovatek or similar fitting , very popular in Europe ?

[Cathar]

Originally posted by TerraMex
I actually have one of those small pumps , which i used earlier for testing purposes but i wouldnt bet my system on it . For robustness and reliablity , my eheim 1048 takes the cake (and it's twice the size of the Aquael ).

Anyway, it is an interesting test but the target market doesnt usually use such low flow pumps. So i was wondering, are you thinking of other fittings for the Cascade? Something like the plug and cool , or Innovatek or similar fitting , very popular in Europe ?

The test was more done because people keep asking me "What size pump do you recommend to use with the Cascade?"

How do I answer that now? I mean any sized pump, even from the pathetically weak that I tested with, which is less than half the pump that you pictured, still yields good results, but bigger pumps will always yield better results (to a point until pump heat takes over).

So really, how do I answer the question? What pump do I think will work best? What's a minimum? Well there is no real minimum so long as it pushes a bit of flow, the block will do its job, and do it well, and do it better than pretty much any other block given the same pump (in my testing at least).

I can fit on whatever size fittings that people request. I just prefer the 1/2" fittings because they offer one of the lowest forms of fitting-based pressure-drop resistance acting against the pump without resorting to the much larger 5/8" tubing sizes.

[TerraMex]

I see your point . Still, most wont be using anything lower than a eheim 1046 (300 lph) , specially with a multi block setup and/or large tubing (up to 1/2"). But it's always good to know where the limits are.

The second question was more of a commercial nature. Having a block "outfitted" (pun intended) with a different set , it could be more interesting for another part of the WC market , as i stated before, the EU market, as it is flooded with 1/4" and 3/8" fittings, fastfitting, plug&cool, etc (just like Bladerunner is using).

Personally i have no interested in these last ones , my system is full 1/2" with the lowest restriction that i could make, i was just curious.

[Cathar]

Originally posted by TerraMex
The second question was more of a commercial nature. Having a block "outfitted" (pun intended) with a different set , it could be more interesting for another part of the WC market , as i stated before, the EU market, as it is flooded with 1/4" and 3/8" fittings, fastfitting, plug&cool, etc (just like Bladerunner is using).

As I said. If people want 3/8", or even 1/4" fittings attached, I'll do it for them by request. As the testing shows, the block would still perform well with such meagre fitting sizes, but for these fitting sizes it'd be near pointless to use a pump any stronger than an Eheim 1046, as the dominant source of pressure resistance acting against the pump is the fittings themselves, and even the hosing.

Personally, for small tubing sizes I'd only consider 3/8" tubing with an Eheim 1048 with 3/8" fittings and some push-fit hose fittings where the fitting inner diameter orifice size is the same as the hosing. To go smaller than that kinda defeats the purpose of "optimising" your water-cooling performance.

[bigben2k]

How about 3/4"

[flyingass]

yeah, 3/4" - just happens to match the johnson pump output though 5/8" will fit....

[Cathar]

Originally posted by flyingass
yeah, 3/4" - just happens to match the johnson pump output though 5/8" will fit....

Nah, 1/2" Tygon can be made to fit over 3/4" fittings.

That's about its limit though. Boiling hot water and soap.

[Gareth]

Cather do u have and plans for bringing out a ‘cascade’ graphics card cooler, designed specifically for the ~16mm² GPU nots tecs?

[Blackeagle]

Cathar has said he will be developing a GPU block of the Cascade design. But it will be some time before it's out.

He's swamped right now with getting the Cascade CPU orders shipped to those on his waiting list (Me to!).

Think about the number of really high performing GPU water blocks there are. Next to nothing compared to CPU block development. When the GPU Cascade comes out it is going to sell like crazy, nothing else will come anywhere near it.

Present GPU's don't develop the amount of heat a CPU does, even if overclocked hard. But they are getting hotter fast with each new card series. The NV 40 or Ati 420 will most likly need a block like the Cascade to overclock well.

AND WE'LL HAVE THEM JUST IN TIME ! !

[Cathar]

Just a post to show off the plethora of pictures I took of the latest creation.

The block base is pure silver. The block features certain modifications to take advantage of the use of silver, and pushes certain elements of the Cascade design just a little bit further, which was only possible by hand picking machined parts that suited the modifications being done.

Will get it into the test-bed tonight.

For now, here's the piccies, some with flash, some without. The no flash pictures are a little blurry, but perhaps give the best indication of what the block looks like in real life, whereas the flash pictures look a little sterile.