Love the technical talk! Definitely good to get into how cooling and the industry works
...A lot of OCN'ers seem to think rather than "know" something. A lot of back and forth dribble over the thoughts of this or that more so than any real evidence provided by any of them...
Many of the guys over there are known overclockers or SIs who build high performance systems for business customers. And they've done some pretty extensive testing on on our blocks, on different CPUs, and the results, while variable, are very positive and very real. Some of the builders are more serious than others, but they'll post screenshots and detailed test setups so you know it's legit. Here's a link to the user benchmarking list with sources linked:
https://optimuspc.com/pages/reviews
And here's a pretty clean test by user Nory:
Where mounting pressure does make a difference, a lot of times, it's not that great or noticeable.
We'll quibble here. Mounting pressure 100% makes a difference across any waterblock mating to the IHS. On our blocks especially, strong mounting pressure makes a great difference. The reason is you want the best contact between the cold plate and the IHS. And to push out the thermal paste as much as possible. The difference between weak and strong pressure with our blocks can be around 5c or so.
For example, "our mounting design has an average higher clamping force of 130 inch pounds over leading competitors" for example.
Or another, "We can use a lighter clamping force because our waterblock cooling plate design is THAT efficient, this is where we can drop 5c" (I gather this is currently in use)
That's where a lot of criticism comes from I think. It's hard to make claims without good information with numbers. I need data. It's how I am.
Clearly those aren't our quotes
So not sure who's criticizing us for making a claim like that, since we don't say anything about lighter clamping force, etc.
As for data, we love data
That's why we've listed far more information about our product than any other water cooling company. Our product pages are MASSIVE. Details about fin sizes, materials used, everything. No other company comes close to giving the details that we do. I imagine we could add heat maps and some other calculations, but there really isn't anything to compare it to. Because not sure what company (in this water cooling space) provides information like that. It's mostly about RGBs these days.
So for example, the cold plate can hold X amount of BTU at X dissipation rate over X period of time. These are 3 very important figures to have and much better for people's understanding.
Do you have an example for that BTU metric used by cooling companies? The industry typically uses watts per meter kelvin (W/mK), like with thermal pads, higher W/mK, better thermal conductivity. Also, BTU isn't the ideal metric for measuring heat storage or heat transfer since BTU = unit of heat/energy. If you're talking about "specific heat capacity" aka the amount of heat a material can hold joule/ gram C is the right metric.
And interestingly water is 4.19 J/gC while copper is 0.39 J/gC.
I believe this water block design is top notch just simply for having some mass on that cold plate. It is important to have some BTU storage while water (with/without X amount of surface area) can only consume so much BTU at X temperature. We all know as water gets warmer, it can conduct BTU faster. That's a good thing in so many ways, but still limited to copper's BTU to water transfer time. Thus having copper mass creates a storage of BTU before dissipation increasing the cooling capability of the waterblock.
Hmmm, this isn't how heat transfer works. Having cold plate mass -- aka big ol' thick cold plate -- will transfer heat less efficiently and is the opposite of what is desired.
You don't want copper to hold any heat, it needs to transfer the heat super fast. Otherwise your CPU would heat up and throttle instantly.
Thus, the thinner cold plate is better. Otherwise, mega thick cold plates from back in the day would work better. And removing the IHS, which is copper, would hurt, not help, performance when it's removed.
Instead, bare die with a thin plate with high surface area transfers the most heat away from the die. Because thicker copper acts as an insulator to the die.
Our plates look thicker because the outside is thicker for mounting, but the insides are much thinner.
The fin design is just an added perk. But like air, water always flows the easiest path. I sometimes wondered if surface area fin count plays a big role while having such little space between the small fins. Having even space between the sides and center with enough to have the same flow through all passes is important. You want even flow throughout the entire inside of that waterblock. This is difficult to measure, but if the fins are too close together, it cause more restriction and possible rise in temps. This is the reason on custom loops, you buy a nice big variable speed water pump. Flow matters.
This is definitely way off
"fin design is just an added perk" -- nothing is farther from the truth, fins are the entire ball game
Surface area is 10000% the most important metric in cooling. That's why radiators need massive surface area. A radiator made out of a solid block of copper wouldn't do squat
Better fin area, better flow, better cooling.
Also, you make the classic mistake of assuming more fins = reduced flow rate.
Our blocks have similar flow to other top blocks, we just have far more fins and, thus, far greater surface area. How? The total space between the fins is similar.
And if this wasn't true, the old school waterblocks with like 4 giant fins would cool better. But this is clearly not the case. Also, we haven't come close to reaching the point where water molecules can't fit through the fins. Turbulence is interesting to think about, but that would have to do with the surface finish on the fins themselves, not the distance between them. Yes, flow matters 100%, but assuming flow and fin count are tied that closely is incorrect.
Having a claim of 5c drop in temps is going to be rather difficult in systems that use less radiator, be it the design and passes or just the number of rads and which processor, voltage used ect ect. From a marketing stand point, I'd remove this just to save face and possible BS later.
Again, we never claimed 5c drop in every scenario. We're giving general numbers and only listing user comments from real people who have done real world testing on real systems. Like the example above on the 9900k bare die, he tested it like crazy and saw a 6c improvement. Of course, results will vary between users. Using a 15w CPU? Yeah, you're not gonna see any difference. Pushing 400w through an intel 18 core? Big difference.
The technical information will sell the waterblock. It just needs to be organized in Lehman's terms for the average people.
Definitely don't agree here
RGBs sell blocks, marketing sells blocks, cannot see how BTU numbers would mean anything to average buyers. If technical numbers sold blocks, then the industry would look really different (a lot less rainbow bright). Also, I think we've explained why our blocks work pretty well: more surface area = better performance.
In any case, appreciate the feedback and thoughts, good to dive into this stuff
