Introduction
It seems like all the interest these days is centered on the newly released AMD Athlon Processors. In our previous article "The New Athlon Processor - AMD Is Finally Overtaking Intel " we took a detailed look behind the architecture and showed some truly amazing performance results. Just when we thought we had seen the best of the best, KryoTech gives us one of their Cool Athlon 800 MHz rigs to test.
Kryotech, 'The House of Cool Computing' has been the leader in CPU-cooling technology for quite a while. However, in the past their systems still weren't quite the top-performers, because they couldn't team up with Intel, and use their top-notch processors, but chose AMD instead. AMD's past processors were good performers, but they weren't quite fast enough in all of the computing aspects, even when cooled and thus clocked a lot higher than their original specs. Now times have changed, AMD is producing a CPU that is faster than the competing products from Intel in all aspects that are important for computing. This puts Kryotech's Cool Athlon in the position of not only passing Intel's top-performers, but really leaving them in the dust. Finally Kryotech is able to show what they really can do, not only in terms of cooling technology, but also in terms of vast performance.
About The System
We went into detail a while back regarding KryoTech and their technology in a previous article "The Overclocker's Dream KryoTech's Home of Cool Computing ". Now KryoTech has taken this same proven technology and applied it to AMD's Athlon processor. They've been working hand in hand with AMD's support and were able to take a 600 MHz Athlon processor and clock it up to 800 MHz. The first sample we received from KryoTech was shipped to us as a typical barebone-system, including a Microstar MS-6167-motherboard, Cool AMD Athlon 800 MHz CPU, and Tower Chassis. KryoTech will alternatively use the Gigabyte 7IX-motherboard as well, and the systems will start shipping at about $2200.00 in early September.
The KryoTech Cool Athlon 800 MHz system runs like any other standard PC. The only difference is that when you power up the system, the refrigeration unit starts first. Once the refrigeration unit hits -36 degrees Celsius the unit automatically powers up the system board.
