Introduction

Extreme Measures

How far are you willing to go to overclock your system? Actually, we should really ask how much effort are you willing to put into cooling your CPU. As everyone now knows, cooling plays a large role in overclocking.

Companies first started sticking heatsinks and fans on CPUs back in the 486 days, but the practice wasn't standardized until a little later. You can still find some of the earlier Pentium and Pentium Pro systems with heatsinks but without fans. We can't even imagine running a CPU without a fan today. (With Nvidia's GeForce 256, it looks like video cards will also come standard with fans in the near future.)

Overclocking is now mainstream in computer enthusiast circles, and the overclocking consumer population has grown large enough to support a small overclocking supply industry. We see specialized cooling units from Alpha and Vantec, and of course you can't forget Peltier coolers. When people first started experimenting with better cooling for overclocking, they didn't go with better heatsink designs or dual fans. They went straight to the Peltier. Manufacturers later filled in the product gap between standard cooling and the extreme Peltier coolers.

Another extreme cooling throwback

KryoTech is another big name in overclocking's brief history. The first company to popularize the use of refrigeration units as an active CPU cooling solution, KryoTech has become famous for their super-cool, super-fast systems.

In the past, KryoTech systems haven't been all that popular because they only made AMD systems. Even though KryoTech's Renegade line of coolers are compatible with Intel slot-1 and socket-370 processors, most people still associate KryoTech with AMD.

We can understand why thought of a super-fast K6-2 or K6-3 didn't spark much interest among our readers. Now AMD has the Athlon and you can just guess what KryoTech is doing with it. Does an 800MHz Athlon sound appealing to you?