Why is Kryotech so Cool?
Kryotech is nowadays a name that is known to most of my readers and particularly the power users amongst you have certainly already contemplated running your system with one of the super cooling devices from this company based in the deep and hot South of the US. Unfortunately Kryotech was not yet able to cut any kind of deal with Intel, so that there hasn’t been any Kryotech cooled system with an Intel CPU so far. We are all aware of Intel’s disapproval of overclocking, which seems to be strong enough that there isn’t even an interest to do some kind of joint venture between Intel and Kryotech, although it would most likely lead to the fastest PC on Earth under highly professional conditions. The systems that Kryotech has made available so far are either based on an Alpha CPU, running it at no less than 667 MHz, or on an AMD K6-2 450 and now a K6-3 500. Although there is nothing wrong with the AMD K6-3, a raise in clock speed from 450 to 500 MHz isn’t really enough to shell out the additional 500 bucks for the cooling unit of a Kryotech K6-3 500 system. Hence the x86-systems supplied by Kryotech weren’t really competitive as yet. This could change tremendously either with the release of AMD’s K7, which could run at up to 1 GHz when cooled by Kryotech, or in case that we would be able to cool an Intel CPU based system and run it at very high speed. Many of today’s power users are 3D-gaming cracks, which is why the K6-3 with it’s lower FPU performance is not really the right choice for a super cooling system. Thus we have to wait for K7 or somebody tries and runs an Intel CPU cooled with the Kryotech technology.
A few weeks ago I received a K6-3 500 system from Kryotech, consisting of a case, the special bottom unit with the cooling device, an Asus P5A motherboard and a K6-3 450 overclocked to 500 MHz. Instead of testing this system, I instantly took it apart and tried to use it for other purposes, as described further below.
Kryotech’s Super Cooling Technology
Before I will get into what you can do with the Kryotech system using the new ‘clamshell’ technology, I would like to shed some light into the basics of how a Kryotech system works.
We have heard a lot about all different kind of cooling devices that would allow us to overclock our CPUs. The most common one is an oversized heat sink plus fan, but this solution can get the CPU never any cooler than the surrounding room temperature. The alternative would be a peltier element, which can indeed cool a CPU below room temperature, but most of the time you cannot even reach the freezing point of 0 degrees Celsius or 32 degrees Fahrenheit. Kryotech’ system however is designed to cool a CPU to -50 degrees Celsius or -58 degrees Fahrenheit. You can imagine that this is indeed ‘damn cold’ and miles away from room temperature. – 50 єC put a CPU into completely different conditions, so that you can run it at speeds way beyond the official specs of this CPU.
The technology behind Kryotech’s super cooling comes from nothing else but a freezer as most of you have it at home to store your fries and frozen pizzas. The bottom unit of a Kryotech unit hosts a pretty big compressor and the liquid that runs through the little pipes to the CPU is pretty much the same cooling liquid used in freezers, refrigerators and air conditionings. When you switch on a Kryotech system you hear the same sound that you are used from your fridge or freezer, the compressor starts running. Before the computer system starts, the Kryotech cooling unit waits until the CPU has reached a temperature of less than -35 єC. Then the computer system starts and the CPU is able to boot up with a clock speed that it could never reach for even a second at room temperature. Well, none of the above said is really new to the ones that have followed Kryotech since my first article about Kryotech from July 1997, and the ones who haven’t read this good old article should have a quick look at it for a better understanding of Kryotech’s technology. The new thing about the system I received last month is the way the CPU in isolated from the surrounding, using Kryotech’s new ‘clamshell’ technology.
Insulating the Super Cool CPU is One of the Key Issues
Cooling a CPU down to -50 єK below the freezing point of water requires a very well done isolation from the surrounding. You can certainly imagine that otherwise all the liquid in the air around it would instantly freeze at the CPU and the components around it, further away condensed water would cover the less cold components of the motherboard and this would definitely jeopardize if not even destroy any computer system due to short cuts. Thus the CPU needs to be isolated very well and to avoid any condensing water, the cover of the CPU should even be heated. So far Kryotech achieved this by putting the cooled Socket7-CPU inside a special capsule, which would plug into the Socket on the motherboard. The big disadvantage of this procedure is that the CPU is not directly plugged into the Socket, so that the signal way through the capsule was getting about one inch longer than it was supposed to be, which caused a lot of failures. I received a system with the old capsule technique last year in December, but because the system never ran NT nor any kind of SCSI device I declared the system as too unstable and declined from writing a devastating article about it. Kryotech has done a lot of work since then, and now the new ‘clamshell’ technology allows the CPU to stay right where it belongs, inside the motherboard socket. The isolation is achieved by placing the ‘capsule’ right onto the motherboard and another isolation layer underneath the motherboard, right under the CPU. This way the system runs rock stable and you can go ahead overclocking it.
Tom’s Custom Super Cool Celeron
As already said, when I received the Kryotech Cool K6-3 500 system I wasn’t too impressed by its performance, because it wasn’t too far away from a normal K6-3 450 system and also because the K6-3 is still not exactly the fastest CPU for 3D-gaming. Thus I really wanted to run an Intel CPU at speeds way beyond its specifications and so the only useful CPU turned out to be an Intel Celeron CPU. We all know that all Intel CPUs are today shipping with a multiplier lock, so that it is impossible to run any of those CPUs faster than its spec unless you change the front side bus speed. Doing this with a Pentium II or Pentium III wouldn’t let you go very far, because you have to make sure that the AGP clock doesn’t exceed 75 MHz, unless you want to have trouble with 3D-applications. A FSB of 133 MHz may sound nice and will certainly be interesting in the future, but with today’s Intel chipsets the AGP clock is at least two thirds of the FSB and no modern AGP 3D-card will run 3D-applications at an AGP clock of 88.6 MHz. Thus the decision had to be clearly against a Pentium II or Pentium III CPU. The story is a lot different with the Celeron. This CPU is currently still supposed to run at 66 MHz FSB only. If you raise the FSB to 100 MHz in a BX-board, you can run 66 MHz AGP clock and still overclock the CPU by 50%. The other beauty of Celeron is its low price. Running a Celeron 400 (6×66 MHz) at 600 MHz (6×100 MHz) would result in a CPU performance that’s way beyond anything shipped by Intel right now and this at a price that would make the investment into a Kryotech cooling unit worth while indeed.
The Kryotech device that’s placed onto the K6-3 CPU to cool it down to -50 єC, called evaporator, had logically the size of a Socket7-CPU. It was fixed pretty much the same way as a normal heatsink/fan-combo is mounted to the Socket7. Luckily Socket370 has the identical dimensions of Socket7, so that it was easy to attach the Kryotech K6-3 cooling system to a Celeron for Socket370. To run this CPU in an Abit BX6 rev.2.0 motherboard I was using Abit’s Socket370/Slot1 converter card, isolated it as good as I could and ‘voila’ I had my super cooled Celeron system. It turned out that isolating the Socket370/Slot1-converter card was a lot easier than isolating a special area on a Socket7-motherboard, as done by Kryotech in the K6-3 system. I simply isolated the complete card and didn’t have to worry about any frozen or condensed water anywhere.
618 MHz is What You Get
First of all I tested all the speeds that I could reach and was at least a little bit disappointed that there was no way of running the Celeron 400 any faster than 618 MHz (103 MHz x 6). It seems that the current design of Intel’s 0.25 micron ‘Mendocino’-core doesn’t allow any higher clock speeds. A Celeron 433 would also not reach 650 MHz. Still 618 MHz is way beyond 500 MHz of a Pentium III and the system ran all the Quake2 demos continuously with ‘timedemo’ set to ‘1’ for more than a week without a crash, actually the week when I was at CeBIT.
Benchmark Setup
The system that I used for my ‘super cool’ benchmark used pretty much the normal benchmark setup of previous benchmark session. The motherboard used was an Abit BX6 rev. 2.0, obviously chosen because it’s the most convenient motherboard for overclocking. I used 128 MB of Samsung PC100 SDRAM with the CAS latency set to ‘2’. The hard drive used was the well-known 10,000-RPM IBM DGVS 09U ultra-SCSI drive, connected to an Adaptec 2940U2W SCSI host adapter. The graphics card used was NVIDIA’s reference TNT2 card with 32 MB, clocked 150/183 MHz, using driver 1.72b. I ran Windows 98 and Windows NT4 SP4 at 1024×768 screen resolution, with a color depth of 16 bit and a refresh rate of 85 Hz. Quake 2 ran at 1024x768x16 and so did Shogo.
The Results
You can see that the super cool Celeron beats Intel’s current flagship the Pentium III 500 in pretty much all of the benchmarks. Quake2 running ‘demo1’ is rather limited by the graphics card than by the CPU, which is why both CPUs score identical here, almost the same is valid for ‘massive1’ as well. In Shogo as well as 3D StudioMax the Celeron 618 smokes the PIII 500 big time, since booth benchmarks depend quite a lot on pure CPU computing power.
Summary
The above results prove it again, Intel’s Celeron is currently the best CPU for overclockers. Combining the best overclocker-CPU with the best cooling that’s currently available results in the fastest PC-system money could buy. Now the only thing we need is Kryotech providing us their very own solution for a Socket370 and/or Slot1 Celeron and Intel leaving us alone with the highly annoying frequency lock for Celeron. Tom’s Hardware Guide has quite a few ideas on how to get even more out of this ‘Celeron meets Kryotech’-solution, but before I get into detail I will make sure that it all works out. The super cooled Celeron could be the first really cost effective high performance solution that Kryotech could offer and after all Intel benefits from providing the CPU of the world wide fastest PC.
