Kryotech Renegade

The Kryotech Renegade is about as helpful to overclockers as a secondary fan would be. AnandTech's OEM Pentium II 333 processor that normally maxed out at 416MHz (83MHz x 5.0) with a standard heatsink/fan combo would not even make it to 450MHz with the Renegade cooler. The Pentium II 400 test chip failed to jump above 448MHz as the 468MHz mark (117MHz x 4.0) was not stable enough, even with the added cooling.

Although it might help some Celeron 300A users hit that 504MHz mark, there's no point in spending $400 on a system that offers less than a specialty Celeron fan would at less than 20% of the cost. Kryotech claims that the Renegade can allow for a 10% overclock in the cooled processor's clock speed, however what isn't mentioned is that same clock increase is generally attainable by normal means of cooling. So what makes Kryotech Renegade so special?

The purpose of the Kryotech Renegade isn't to bring the overclockability of the Cool K6-3 down to Slot-1 owners, rather it is to offer a dramatic stability increase due to the implementation of a more effective cooling method, at a semi reasonable cost. The room temperature cooling allows for the processor to virtually be removed from the temperature equation inside of your case. Especially for users that have SCSI hard drives and newer video cards that already generate considerable amounts of heat, the Renegade can definitely improve system stability. AnandTech's own tests show at least a 5% increase in stability in normal operating conditions, and you can expect a greater increase in stability as the conditions worsen. The AnandTech test system never crashed once during hours of back to back memory intensive application testing, it is for that reason that the Kryotech Renegade is being used in AnandTech's memory stability tests to prevent heat issues from adversely effecting the stability of memory modules during testing.

However the question still remains, how much is that extra 5% worth to you? For most users, definitely not $400. Kryotech needs to start out by including a decent power supply in their Renegade, without one, the $400 price tag seems to be much worse. Secondly, if the purpose of this system is to achieve higher levels of stability, the target market would seem to be those individuals interested in higher end applications, and generally, high end workstations, meaning that they will have more demanding needs from their computers. The mid-tower ATX case on the Renegade, like the Cool K6-3, is simply too small for most power users to live with, hopefully a larger version of the solution will come around in the future.

The Renegade is a promising solution from Kryotech, as have all of their solutions been, however the only way Kryotech would win a "go out and buy it" recommendation from AnandTech would be if the Slot-1 Renegade ATX - PE dropped at least down to the $325 mark with a power supply. Kryotech is still a young and developing company, whose technology is still far from perfection, but with every dedicated step, the company comes closer and closer to achieving that level of perfection we all dream of, just as Picasso dreamt of his paintings and just as Michelangelo dreamt of his sculptures.