Merry Christmas all. 12 noon on Christmas day already here in Melbourne, Australia.
Silver said:
Cathar, I tip my hat. The view is so much better from the high ground. Merry Christmas to you and yours as well.
Am still looking for results on the Silver. Am wondering if the nozzles might have a different impact when used with the silver medium.
Would a high pressure/high flow in line fuel filter aid in keeping the smaller nozzle holes from "plugging" up? Would an inline be too restrictive. 1oz rounds and 10 oz bars can be bought at fairly close to spot value so why are there not more home built blocks around using this medium? On relatively low pressure systems how does one design to allow for the the displacement of the water in the block so as to maximise the effect of a low flow high velocity impingement?
Okay, let's start by pointing out that silver has, depending on the purity of the copper and the silver being compared, between 6-12% better thermal conductivity than copper. Given the C110 grade copper (>99.9% pure) that most blocks are made from, and the pure fine silver (>99.99%) that the Cascade SS is made from, we could probably predict around 10% better thermal conductivity for the silver over the copper. It must be stated that we can never expect huge gains from such small differences. The physics alone tells us that anything more than a 1C difference will most likely be due to thermal probe error than anything else.
The Cascade SS uses a tweaked base configuration and tweaked jet nozzle configuration to make better use of silver's slightly higher thermal conductivity over copper. This allows one to realise the full gain of what silver has to offer over copper. Just doing a straight copper-replaced-with-silver block is likely to yield very minimal gain (<0.5C for a hot CPU). By redesigning the base/jets to account for the higher thermal conductivity, I was able to realise about a full 1C gain over the copper block, and also achieve a better overclock on 3 separate AMD Barton XP CPU's I tried it out on (+20MHz, +25MHz and +40MHz), which basically translates in theory as better hot-spot management for the CPUs, which tells a greater story than just the temperature gain alone.
Regarding water filters. I have two types of filters here:
The clear plastic one is a Shurflo brand in-line strainer used for marine water systems. It costs around $10 US. The barbs can be changed to face any of the 4 directions, so it is very compact to use in-case, although it has moderate flow resistance.
The black one is a micro-irrigation filter. Very low flow restriction. It can be picked up for around $2-3 US at a HomeDepot or other hardware store that carries irrigation equipment. It's only drawback is its size, being about 8" (20cm) long.
Both filters do an excellent job of keeping crap out of fine waterblocks. The black irrigation filter will hold quite substantial amounts of debris before becoming restrictive.
The main issue with making blocks out of silver is not so much simply acquiring the silver, but acquiring it in the right shape/thickness so that it is not being wasted as it gets cut away. With the Cascade SS I had to import silver of the correct thickness as I was unable to find it in a suitable thickness here in Australia. The production of the SS "wastes" about 5% of the original silver piece, so it is a very efficient block to make in silver on that score. Largee, thicker and contoured blocks will waste considerably more material making the actual cost of the silver quite a deal higher than the weight of what remains in the final block's format.
With regards to low pressure vs high pressure, the best one can do here is a trade-off. It requires a very weak pump (~1W), or just a weak pump in a very high restriction setup, in order to not give a block like the Cascade enough pressure for it to do its job well. This is a relative thing though in that any other block you care to name
when given the same weak pressure is likely to do a whole lot worse than the Cascade.
It is possible to better design waterblocks to perform better when presented with ultra-low flow rates/pressure, but this almost invariably comes at the expense of higher-end performance, so it's best to just design for the pumps that most people use (Eheim 1048 and better) and recommend that they use those pumps if they want to see the best of what's on offer. Can't win them all here. If you want high-end flow-pressure performance, you have to sacrifice some of the potential at the ultra-low end, and vice-versa.