Can anyone rate the primochill Typhoon III?

[BoxGods]

The sad part about this whole train wreck is that it all could have been avoided with some basic pre-release testing.

I got a couple of pretty early release T3 samples and made everyone aware of some fundamental design flaws which could have easily been picked up on and corrected had any sort of pre testing been done but this was way to late as a full production run had already been made and retailer shelves were already being stacked but little did anyone realise at that point, the T3 was literally a ticking time bomb waiting to be installed into countless systems around the world.

Six months down the line and forums all around the globe are literally littered with the carnage this little plastic toy res has left in it wake and guess what.....there is nobody going to be held accountable for all the broken hardware never mind the res itself.

I said at the time, i was, and still am a fan of this type of res/pump combo due to how it can be mounted in a couple of drive bays but i can only presume that testing was totally sacrificed due to the pull of making money.....and lots of it judging by how many people have these.

My own experience....

I got my two T3's installed into the Zotac mod which was shipped to Denmark for an nVidia conference but on its arrival the entire Skulltrail system including two GTX295's was a soggy mess due to total failure of both T3's and never to work again so i didn't come out of this one unscathed.

I'm sorry i have little sympathy for how this turned out as it all could have been avoided had greed been put aside and some simple testing put in place but instead it was decided to use the buying public as Guinea Pigs which just isn't acceptable in my book.

I know little of the relationship between Brian and Geno but is it any wonder the two parties have fallen out and the mud slinging started when nether is prepared to accept responsibility yet prefer to blame each other in an open forum which IMO is probably the only good thing to come out of this so hopefully we won't get burned with another epic fail any time soon.

Insightful post as always. The reality though was that the parts were tested extensively before any products shipped. Though I was not the official testing entity I personally beat the crap out of dozens of T3's early on. I still have most of them in fact. The last batch of samples I tested were bullet proof. I took a fully assembled T3 and hurled it at the floor of my shop. It is that thin industrial carpet over concrete, no padding. The corner that hit chipped off about a quarter inch in either direction and that was the extent of the damage. Hardly a scientific test I know, but when I do the same test on a T3 now it literally shatters into many smaller parts. Common sense says something is different between the two runs of parts.

The mistake is assuming that the company that made the samples, which is also the company that did the China production runs made every successive production run to the same standards as they did on the initial test samples. It is impossible to look at two crystal clear parts and know if one was processed differently.

Although I am not a fan of injection molded clear plastics in mission critical (holding water under pressure) applications based on my experiences with the T3 development process, meaning I would not do it again because it's a PITA, the concept and design are still a very viable product if one relatively simple step in the process is guaranteed. Annealing. I do believe that the poor mix ratios (way too much UV stabilizer) in the Chinese shop was a big factor in the cracking issue we saw in later runs of parts but the major issue is that parts were not annealed. This is just my opinion and as always I will state I am not a plastics expert by any stretch.

When plastics are molded uneven heating and cooling cause "built in" stresses. It is a very well known and documented factor in molded plastics and is removed by slowly heating the plastic parts to a preset temperature, holding the part at that temperature for a preset time, then allowing for a gradual and controlled cooling. The entire process is usually performed in special ovens that have a specific gas in them. Don't take my word for it, Google "Plastic Annealing" and you will find tons of information on the subject.

If you remove the built in stresses the plastic is stronger and there are no more built in stresses and the cracking issue goes away. The parts should be tapped first then annealed as the tapping process will also build in stresses and weaken the threads.

I know parts for 500 units shipped from California and although my shop will not be doing post production I doubt Brian is going to risk more failures by not having the parts annealed. Believe me I have made him aware of the importance of annealing including links to articles on it so I just can't imagine he is not going to have it done.