Kryotech SuperG Athlon 1000MHz

It has been quite a while since we have talked about the technology behind Kryotech’s cooling systems, but now is as good a time as any to provide a little refresher.

As we mentioned before, we were first introduced to Kryotech’s cooling technology at the 1998 E3 Expo in Atlanta.  The technology used in the Cool K6-2s back then and the SuperG today is identical and is known as Vapor-Phase Refrigeration. 

Vapor-Phase Refrigeration is the same technology that makes the refrigerator in your kitchen keep your food cold.  Vapor-Phase Refrigeration uses the physical properties of a refrigerant, like the one mentioned above, to achieve an effective level of cooling.  The refrigerant is stored in a liquid form and heated to the point where a phase change is initiated, converting the liquid to a gas which cycles through the cooling system and is returned to a compressor which initiates another phase change and compresses the gas to a near-liquid form. This enables the heat to be removed from the source, and the cooling system itself to remain self sufficient.

Kryotech claims that Vapor Phase Refrigeration is 50 times as effective as traditional forced air cooling (your standard heatsink/fan combo cooling device) and 5 times as effective as forced liquid cooling. Using Vapor Phase Refrigeration, Kryotech has been able to allow their products to run at levels around -40 degrees Celsius, including the SuperG. 

The Kryotech SuperG uses the same Vapor Phase Refrigeration technology used in the older Cool K6-X and Cool Athlon series.  The CPU is placed and isolated in a chamber known as the KryoCavity.  The KryoCavity features a nickel plate that makes contact with the surface of the CPU itself as well as the L2 cache.  The heat is extracted from the plate and transferred through the thermal bus, essentially a fairly thick and barely malleable black tube.  This process leaves the surface of the plate at approximately –40 C and thus allows for the “thermal acceleration” of the Athlon CPU to higher frequencies (basically, Kryotech is safely overclocking the Athlon; the ‘safely’ part comes from the fact that, by cooling the CPU down to such a low temperature, you immediately increase the range of clock speeds it can operate at). 

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The tube runs down from the main portion of the Kryotech case down to the base where it runs through the compressor and the Vapor Phase Refrigeration process takes over, converting the resulting heated liquid and compressing it to a gas which is then sent back up into the KryoCavity and the cycle continues. 

Removing the heat that the processor introduces into the case, through the use of the KryoCavity, provides for a more stable operating environment since you don't have to worry about the presence of an extremely hot processor contributing to the growing heat problem in today's desktop computers. The only producers of heat in the case that remain are devices such as video cards and hard drives which should operate much more comfortably with the heat of the processor removed from their surroundings. 

The heart of the SuperG is AMD’s latest 0.18-micron 750/800MHz Athlon core that is “thermally accelerated” to 1000MHz, using a 10.0x multiplier and the default 100MHz FSB.  The L2 cache of this CPU, like the 750/800MHz air-cooled Athlons is set to 2/5 the core clock and, with the core operating at 1000MHz, the L2 cache runs at 400MHz, the highest for any available Athlon.   Since, currently, the Athlon doesn’t have a full speed on-die L2 cache, the performance advantage that it holds over the new Pentium IIIs based on the Coppermine core is reduced in certain situations.

With the Super G, Kryotech is a bit more flexible with the motherboard configurations.  They allow for either a Gigabyte GA-7IX or a Microstar 6167 to be used in the system since the two layouts are virtually identical.  The sample we tested was outfitted with the Gigabyte GA-7IX.