For those of you not familiar with previous offerings from the folks at Kryotech, we're talking some serious cooling, taking the Athlon processor temperature down to -40 degrees Celsius and allowing it to run at much faster speeds than otherwise possible. The system consists of a compressor, a condenser, KryoTech's nRT Thermal Bus and Evaporator, their KryoCavity, and, of course, fans.

How it works (to offer a Cliffs' Notes version of what can be found described in greater detail on KryoTech's web site, is that a compressor resides in a compartment that accounts for about a third the size of the Cold-Fusion Desktop tower. Their nRT Thermal Bus and Evaporator delivers the cooling to the processor, which is hermetically encapsulated by the KryoCavity.

All this is controlled, finally, by a system management system that ensures the processor has been sufficiently cooled before your system can boot. The downside is that it means having to wait a few minutes for your system to boot.

But all this is not an "overclock" in the conventional sense. You can't easily fiddle with the settings and try to get more or less out of it because the BIOS of the Gigabyte GA-7DX motherboard they use won't let you. Rather, they say it's their cooling that lets the system perform at the higher speed.

Well for starters, a hernia is what you might get. This beast is a lot heavier than it looks. And once you pop the case and start nosing around, you'll see why. As mentioned above, about a third of the tower is used to hold a compressor that looks like it belongs in a bigger refrigerator than most of us take to college. But SYS' offerings don't end there.

SYS Technologies offers a good set of configuration options that should satisfy most enthusiasts. From Plextor CDRW drives to Pioneer DVD's to IBM 60GXP hard drives to the latest video cards, SYS has chosen some reputable vendors for their customers to choose products from. The system we received came equipped with a Leadtek TDR GF3 video card, a 40GB IBM 60GXP HD, and 256MB of PC2100 DDR-SDRAM, specs that were up to task of challenging our benchmarks of previous system setups.