Kryotech Renegade

The Renegade is offered in two similar flavors, the Renegade ATX - Standard Edition (SE) and the Renegade ATX - Premium Edition (PE). The only difference, other than the $50 price increase the Premium Edition holds over the Standard Renegade, is the fact that the Renegade ATX - PE features the same LCD and intelligent shutdown features (i.e. the system powers itself off in the event of a cooling failure) as the Cool K6-3 while the Renegade ATX - SE comes without both of those capabilities.

The Renegade is then broken down into two more distinct flavors, the Universal Socket-7/370 design and the Universal Slot-1 design. As the names imply, the Universal Socket-7/370 Renegade is intended for use with both Socket-7 and Socket-370 processors, due to the similarity of the socket designs, a single socket cooling Renegade can work on either platform; and the Universal Slot-1 Renegade is for use with Intel Celeron, Celeron A, Pentium II, and Pentium III processors. The only real requirement other than the two interface requirements Kryotech places on the Renegade is that the processor being cooled should dissipate no more than 45W of heat.

The Renegade system comes with a mid-tower ATX case (the exact same case used for the Cool K6-3), and the Renegade cooling system itself, consisting of the compressor, thermal bus, and a cooling plate (no KryoCavity due to the nature of the cooling). Unfortunately, the system comes with no power supply for the actual computer (there is one included for the cooler), which should add at least $30 to the final cost of the system for a decent ATX power supply. Depending on the type of Renegade, the pricing ranges from $349 for a Socket-7/370 ATX-SE system to $409 for a Slot-1 ATX-PE system, a more manageable price range for most users. But is the Renegade worth it? There's only one way to find out.

AnandTech quickly found the Slot-1 Renegade ATX-PE prototype to be a much more clean cut solution than Kryotech's Cool K6-3 500 simply because of the lack of the KryoCavity on the inside of the case. The only thing visible in the case compartment where AnandTech attempted to install the test ABIT BX6 Revision 2.0 motherboard, was the thermal bus which is a tube no larger than 3/4" in diameter leading up to a small nickel cooling plate. Kryotech's choice to use nickel instead of copper in the cooling plate was one to improve the aesthetics of the system, and doesn't adversely affect the cooling performance of the system at all.

After digging out an old Pentium II 400 to experiment with, AnandTech proceeded to remove the heatsink on the CPU in order to replace it with the Renegade's cooling plate. Kryotech included a tool in the Renegade's packaging to help remove the hex nuts on retail Pentium II heatsinks, however AnandTech's OEM chip didn't require any extra aid to remove the heatsink.