Phase Change Processor cooling
Supplied by: Asetek
MSRP incl VAT : 900 EUR (seen for 650 at local e-tailers).

Extreme sub-zero phase change cooling.

All rise! It's daddy cool himself. A while ago something struck my severe curiosity. See, in our forums we have a benchmark mayhem section and there is this group of people who constantly improve their 3DMark, AquaMark and SuperPi scores. Seriously, go and have a look, it's a really fun process to observe and get involved with. Right now a group of over 115 forum users are constantly competing with several other websites. In most cases we are in second place but we can't seem to pass the 3Dmark06 record for Xtremesystems (grrrrrr).

It is looking like this:

Team Ranking

rank - top 10 average - team name

1. 11652.80 XtremeSystems
2. 11267.40 Guru3D
3. 10092.60 Bleedinedge
4. 9995.40 Extreme Prometeia
5. 9121.20 Techzonept

So what does that have to do with this article ? Well, I was intrigued by how intensely caught up people can get in this stuff and it actually had me going for a couple of days. The real Guru's among us constantly were talking about the LS. "Yeah I have to get me an LS", "I can do much better once I get my LS" and so on. Honestly, I had no clue what an LS was, but the people that did own an "LS" had FAR better scores then the rest which made me curious.

Obviously they where talking about the extreme (below-zero) super-cooling in the form of an Asetek Vapochill LS cooling unit that is chilling down the processor. Asetek has been at the top of the PC cooling industry for a large number of years now, and whilst competitors have come and gone, they remain superlative to the competition with the regular, water and phase-change cooling kits. They are not cheap, but boy do they make quality stuff.

Why is it so important to have your processor nicely chilled? Elementary dear Watson. One of the biggest problems for today's graphics cards is a having a CPU bottleneck that is keeping our graphics card solutions a little below what they can really do. It's the point where your graphics card can still go a little faster yet the CPU can't provide enough data. The best method to solve that is to buy a faster processor, but once you already have the fastest stuff in your rig and there's nothing else left .. there really is only one other thing you can resort to ... it's overclocking your CPU to squeeze out another 10 maybe 20% performance. Everybody can overclock a CPU. Usual with aircooling you can get 5% additional performance out of the CPU.

Now the purpose of a stock cooler is pretty much keeping your CPU for overheating. The next best thing would be Watercooling, which is an excellent way to keep your CPU close to room temperature and offers more overclocking potential. But what if you want or need to go beyond that ? For the uber-extreme performance junkies there are other options left. Now since not everybody is into liquid nitrogen or dry ice and since most of us are looking for a more "durable" solution we need to revert to a technology closer to what your refrigerator is using.

To go way beyond a normal overclock you need to cool that CPU below zero degrees C and that's where the Asetek LS comes in. It's the most expensive and noisiest cooling solution around. It's difficult to install as you'll need to mod your case and you'll have to do crazy stuff with your CPU but the result really is simple, you can cool down the processor with a -54 Degrees C cooling block on that AMD heatspreader and that my friends is such a fun experience you won't believe it.

So what we'll be doing today is showing you our experience with the Asetek Lighspeed VapoChill unit. The LightSpeed is different in a way that it is an external, standalone cooling unit that can be integrated onto (or rather below) any case of your liking.
 

To get a seriously nice looking rig we'll have to go extreme though, drilling, cutting and and some serious technical skills are required for this little project. The outcome however is staggering. We'll have to mod a Lian-Li Case, prep a mainboard, seriously lubricate a CPU on the up and down side, after which we'll try and overclock a not exactly cheapo Athlon FX-57 processor over the 3 GHz barrier which is a really hard thing to do with that CPU.

But let me tease you a little already. We were able to push that FX-57 processor towards nearly 3.5 GHz !

Next page please ...