Will just be interesting to see what pops out at the end of the day. This "Next Gen" range has been on the cards for how long now? It's been somewhat amusing watching the game of cat'n'mouse between the various radiator manufacturers as they all jostle for market mind-share.

One thing which I find somewhat of a misnomer "Power Users Demand - We Deliver!". Really? That was mentioned 3 months ago now and has anyone been delivered anything yet?

Just being "tongue-in-cheek" about it. No offense intended. At the end of the day the end-users will benefit and that's the important thing.

Water-cooling improvements are coming to the end of the road though. Managed to eke out as much performance as possible within the single 120 form factor without going to some radical changes (forwards looking), but it got to the point eventually where we were just picking balance points with the traditional radiator manufacturing principles. PA120's heavily focused on <=70cfm fan performance although they were not bested by anything else in a 120mm form factor up until around 120-130cfm of fannage. Got to a stage where no matter which way we twisted we simply couldn't get more out of a 120mm 10-30dBA fan performance range (10dBA being a Yate-Loon equivalent at 5v, 30dBA being a Panaflo L1A), and in the end had to make a decision on whether it was better to tune purely for that range (<=30dBA), or to tune more broadly up to 45dBA say. We decided it served the end-user community better to provide radiators that best worked in the manner in which water-cooling should be used, which is quiet & excellent cooling performance. The new PA rads still kick butt at higher airflows (as stated above), but rather than make them even better at insanely loud fan volumes, making them better at more tolerable volumes seemed to be more productive and useful.

As for single-pass vs dual-pass. At the sorts of flow rates that people see in systems it's also a matter of swings and roundabouts. In a 120mm form factor, for single-row cores single-pass can work better for flow-rates above 4-6LPM, but dual-pass is arguably better across the board. The 160.1 was single pass because of the low-air-flow restriction nature of the design and it benefitted it well. For smaller radiators it seems to close up somewhat. For dual or triple row cores, dual-pass is always better and flow restriction doesn't really come into it. The vast bulk of the flow restriction in these types of cores all comes from the fittings so being single or multi-pass internally makes very little pressure drop difference, and certainly next to completely insignificant when waterblocks are involved, so long as the radiators have correctly designed end-tanks.

There are other advances which we're looking into further down the road. Don't want to play all our cards at once and certainly don't want to reveal the whole hand to the wider market on a platter, suffice to say radiator performance improvements are not totally done-for yet, but certainly close. Probably another year or two away for those advances, again due to the complexity of eking out the last drops of performance, as well as the need to further investigate other avenues.

Still, this whole radiator development thing has been a real eye-opener for me, if only to open my eyes at the evident lack of adequate research that various companies have been putting into proper radiator design up until the last few months, as well as lack of a properly focused market goal. Simply saying that a radiator fits into a PC case is not enough, the radiators also need to perform well in the fannage scenarios that best match the desired goals of water-cooling's noise-performance benefit.