SYS Technologies Cold Fusion 1000 - Athlon 1GHz

The heart of the Cold Fusion 1000 is an AMD Athlon running at 1000MHz, courtesy of Kryotech’s cooling system.  The chip itself runs at 1.85v which is a 15% increase over the default core voltage for the Athlon which is 1.60v.  The 1.85v setting is still within the range or tolerance for the Athlon, so you shouldn’t worry about your CPU frying as a result of it.  The L2 cache is clocked at 2/5 of the core clock speed, or 400MHz, which is significantly lower than that of the newer Pentium III’s with a full speed on-die L2 cache running at up to 800MHz.  Unfortunately, this is the limiting factor  of the Cold Fusion 1000.  Luckily, we have been led to believe that the Cold Fusion 1000 (and the SuperG system in general) should be able to accept the forthcoming Thunderbird CPU, which is essentially an Athlon with a full speed on-die L2 cache.  We have been told directly from Kryotech that every single Slot-A CPU on AMD's Roadmap will be compatible with the SuperG design. This definitely adds value to the system.

Our test system was outfitted with 128MB of 7ns PC133 SDRAM.  The double sided DIMM featured the usual configuration of sixteen 8MB SDRAM chips, but, in this case, the manufacturer, kti, made use of micro-BGA SDRAM chips instead of the TSOP chips that we are used to.  Using micro-BGA chips helps to reduce the height of the DIMM itself to just under an inch, but, unfortunately, other than that, they only help to increase the cost of the module.  We tried our Corsair and Samsung original SDRAM in the Cold Fusion 1000 and they worked perfectly fine so it isn’t an issue of compatibility.  We would rather have seen SYS use a regular DIMM and cut the cost of the system than opt for the micro-BGA chips on the module. 

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While the 128MB is definitely on the small side for a workstation of this class, for an additional $400 you can double the memory size to 256MB, and for an extra $990 SYS will upgrade the memory to 512MB.  With all upgrades after the initial 128MB base memory configuration SYS only uses 256MB DIMMs in order to keep as many of the 3 DIMM slots as free as possible for future upgrades.  The cost for the respective memory upgrades is also a bit on the high-end compared to SDRAM prices found around the web, so you may be better off doing the memory upgrade on your own.  Just be sure that the memory you are planning on using works flawlessly with the Athlon platform.

The performance of this setup is definitely very impressive.  Under content creation and business applications, it is the fastest setup we have ever tested, both under Windows 98 and Windows NT.  Outfitting the system with 384MB of RAM and testing it under Pro/ENGINEER also made it clear that the system is a force to be reckoned with.  Unfortunately, the advantage that it holds over the next fastest performers (mainly the Pentium III 800E and the Athlon 800) is not as large as we would like it to be thus making justifying the added cost of the SuperG system very difficult, as we discussed in our review of it.  But if you’re looking for the fastest CPU performance available today, the Athlon running at 1000MHz under the hood of the Cold Fusion 1000 is difficult to beat.