Indigo Xtreme

This was the second phase of testing and focuses on testing with Indigo Xtreme which should take out mounting/block bow effects as well as measuring block performance vs flow.

The test setup was identical however in this case multiple mounts were not used for performance results. Indigo Xtreme when applied and reflowed correctly with the right mounting pressure has very similar results from application to application. This is one of the reasons it was chosen in order to test vs flow. Multiple mounts would make the data collection prohibitive as there would be too many variables.

First a good mount was ensured by multiple ETI reflows at varying pressures. The block was tested at one fixed flow rate and the data was analyzed in conjunction with the appearance of the reflow. Once a good mounting pressure was determined the block was then tested across 7 different pump settings. Flow was recorded as well as the water temperature and cpu core temperatures.

The results taken at 39% PWM can be directly compared with the MX-2 results.

The DT Direct block is not a “normal” waterblock. Instead of the water cooling a copper base that transfers heat from the IHS of the CPU with a layer of TIM in between, the DT direct allows water to directly come into contact with the CPU IHS. The advantage is that there is no thermal resistivity due to the TIM and copper base. The down side is that there is less surface area for the water to contact and less heat spreading effect.  Here is the data for the blocks vs pump power setting:

As you can see there are only a few blocks that have different slopes. I.E. A few respond better to high flow than others. However performance of *every* block depends not only on the block but also on the flow. You may wish to base your decision on block purchases based on the expected flow of your loop.

If you know your current block and current flow rate you can use this to compare blocks by using this plot to work out your effective pump power in relation to mine:

It is of note to see that there is a knee in the curve around 1gpm as would be expected and that performance increases are minimal after 2gpm. Do not be fooled by this plot into thinking that the Phobya block is better than the CPU-380. This plot by it’s nature gives an illusion that higher restriction blocks perform better. No one that I know of adjusts their pumps for an exact flow when considering different blocks. Instead pump power is usually kept constant when changing blocks and so the plot of temperature vs pump power is much more useful.

It is also worth comparing IX to MX-2. While improvements can be made by changing your waterblock or your pump pressure, they are also affected significantly by your choice of TIM. Do your research on this (skinneelabs is a great resource for looking at TIMs). IX is certainly one of the best if not the best, however it’s not the simplest to apply and I’ll be putting a guide together for each block that should ensure a good application (at least on socket 2011).

If we compare all blocks and all TIMs we can see the effect of IX vs MX-2 is about 2-5C which is a larger difference than between many of the blocks

We can also see that sometimes changing your TIM may help you more than your block. If we plot this delta we can also use this data as a way to judge the bow/mount of the block in addition to the mount variation that is given by the standard deviation of the MX2:

Here is the same plot but with the raw data points shown:

Again you can see that the mount can make a huge difference and this is shown by the Danger Den M6 which performs much better when using the Koolance CPU-380 mounting kit.

 
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13 COMMENTS

  4. So let me see if I understand, I have a Koolance CPU-380i, in order to obtain the best performance should I put the ports perperdicular to the memory slots (- ||||) or in parallel with the memory slots ( | ||||) ?

  6. How much power (in W) does this (CPU – Intel i7-3930K (Unlapped) @ 4.7GHz 1.45Vcore) represent?

    Thanks a lot!

  9. […] As can be seen the best orientation of the Apogee XL is essentially the same as the older Apogee HD. We only tested one rotation of the Apogee HD because it is a diagonally symmetric block. While there will be slight performance differences in rotation, all four rotations must be tested and that’s just silly. For more details on the Apogee HD it was featured in the 2012 CPU block roundup. […]

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