Dragon F1 Extreme



"Once upon a time" ... sorry for that, but I really need to tell the background story of this container. The creator of this cooling unit is Vince Lucido, better known as K|ngp|n, who has been in the overclocking community for a long time. Since a few years, he spends time designing LN2 cooling units to make the overclocking process more pleasant, temperature-wise. In the past, people used brazed containers, which is a metal construction where you attach a base block to a tube of metal. In the early days, these type of containers did in fact work quite well, as most of the extreme overclockers were spending their time with Athlon64 processors. Those processors did not have such a big heat load and were easy to clock to their limit using dry ice cooling. However, as technology moved on, the hardware generated a higher heat load and in the end, our brazed cooling units were not capable of keeping the processors at low temperatures without losing too much of our cooling substance.

Being an overclocker himself, K|ngp|n decided to design his own cooling units to get the most out of his hardware and not be bothered again by temperatures swinging from -100°C to -50°C in just a few seconds. After a series of high-quality test units, the first 'Dragon F1' units saw the daylight in September '07, more than a year ago. These first units were called thé best in the world by many top overclockers and not much later a second design, the Extreme version, was released.

Did you know, by the way, that K|ngp|n uses the term 'Dragon' for his CPU cooling units and 'Tek9' for his GPU cooling units?

Package




The package is, it has to be said, quite original. I can only remember seeing this kind of boxing method once in the hardware business as a manufacturer of video cards, of which I forgot the name, used the 'tube' for one of it's special release cards.

Features:

Solid piece copper design and construction

Universal mounting for sockets 754, 939, AM2 and LGA 775 based motherboards

All mounting hardware and insulation included

Dynamic LN2 temperature control

Built for Xtreme processor overclocking and performance

Inside the tube

Dragon F1 Extreme container

Insulation material for cooling unit

Mounting for cooling unit

Normally, we would be spending a few lines on the base of the container, which is one of the more important aspects of an extreme cooling unit. However, we want to respect the wishes of the creator of this product, K|ngp|n, and decided not to publish any pictures of the inside of this container. Feel free to browse the internet and look around for inside pics; I know there are already a few around that allow you to look inside the container.

Mounting procedure

The mounting procedure is really straight-forward and is quite simple even if you haven't seen the unit being put together before.






This is a very good way to balance the pressure on the container. If the pressure is not balanced properly, your cooling unit isn't touching the processor completely, making temperature readouts very difficult and will make your processor unstable due to temperature fluctuations.