Although KryoTech's technology has been used in the past at trade shows to power both Intel (somewhat secretively) and AMD (more openly) CPUs, SYS' Cold Fusion series make use of AMD's top of the line Athlon CPU. Inside the KryoCavity sits a .18micron AMD Athlon 750 (a very fast CPU in its own right) sporting 512K of off-die L2 cache.

Those of you not yet familiar with the Athlon might make note that they feature a total of nine execution pipelines: three for address calculations, three for integer calculations, and three for executing x87 (floating point), 3DNow!™ and MMX™ instructions. The Athlon FPU's floating point capability is strong and gives gamers what they want- fast frame rates.

Unfortunately for the Athlon, once AMD got the CPU to 700MHz the cache, clocked at 350MHz (half the speed of the processor's core), reached a technological limit. For the Athlon 750, AMD changed the L2 cache divider from 1:2 to a 1:2.5 ratio dubbed "Pluto 2.5" and thus the cache normally runs 300MHz. However with the aid of KryoTech's Vapor-Phase refrigeration technology, the L2 cache is set to operate at 400MHz instead of the 'default' 300MHz. So when full-speed on-die cache becomes the norm for Athlon's running at 1GHz, the performance will certainly be better than with this current method. The multiplier used to attain the 1GHz (1000MHz) level is 10.0.

There are other differences to a regular Athlon 750. In order to overclock the 750 to that 'magical' 1GHz, upping the voltage of the Athlon's core is a necessity (overclockers do this all day long). Instead of 1.6volts (the default value used), KryoTech upped the voltage to 1.85volts.

Just like the AMD Athlon 750 'evaluation system' that we received earlier last year, the mainboard chosen by SYS was the Gigabyte GA-7IX. Very similar to AMD's own "Fester" reference motherboard, the 7IX features five PCI slots, two ISA slots and a single AGP slot along with the all-important Ultra ATA-66 for those speedy hard drives. Just like the AMD 'Fester' reference design, the 7IX sports three DIMMS capable of harboring up to 768MB. The review system came with 128MB of 7ns PC133 SDRAM. Obviously for Workstations this might seem a bit conservative but for your average gaming needs, this is ample. For an extra $400 you could fill a second slot and be satisfied with a more workable 256MB.