Quote Originally Posted by churchy View Post
pluck: Hmm, while indeed rad performance was influenced mostly by airflow (and from heat transfer from fins to air), part of it's efficiency depended from coolant flow too, so efficiency of heat transfer from coolant to watertubes/fins imho while less important but nevertheless also plays some role - and if inducing extra turbulence at expense of more flow resistance worked in current top waterblocks to enhance heat transfer from block to coolant, i don't see why that cannot work in rads as well for heat transfer from coolant to watertubes/fins, so internally rifled structure of watertubes in these rads makes some sense for me.
Its all about balancing different components.

The gains in a "normal" watercooling system with low wattage and slow fans will be pretty minimal by increasing turbulence.
The drop in flow through the rest of the system may offset any gains made in slightly lower water temps.

However in a system with a smaller rad, or higher wattage. Optimizing the radiator may be more worthwhile. But this isnt consistent with a typical watercooling system (where we use way too much rad and very poor airflow)

As I see it the real place to gain performance is too make the air-rad transfer more efficient, or allow an equally good transfer with less noise.

If a manufacturer could come up with a rad+fan combo that gave acceptable performance with less noise than the competition then I can see it being a great seller. The problem being that achieving this isnt easy.. otherwise I would be making and selling them myself

Churchy's idea below is pretty much the same as I described earlier in the thread, and I still think this is "better" than the fesser's design. However I will be happy to be proven wrong by skinnee's testing