ProCooling - The last 3 years
A Look at the Articles and Events in the past 3 years that ProCooling has seen and been a part of.

3 Years already? well almost. In December of 1999 I purchased ProCooling.com so we are coming up on it. But my obsession with cooling didn't begin with that.  I had a website by another name before then for a few months that showed my first attempts at a water cooling setup.  Lets start from there.

TritiumTech.com - (September 1999)The beginning of this nasty addiction.

producing something for the masses to read.  I didn't care if only 1 person read it, I still thought it was just a lot of fun.  The second piece of writing I did was a bit more in-depth; Water cooling my PC.   I have always been a cooling geek, and peltier technology just enthralled me all through high school. I wrote a few papers on the peltier effect for classes in HS, and designed an electric Air Conditioner using all pelts for the heat pump.  One day at work a few years later I read FrostyFox.com (defunct) from a random link to it. Instantly I knew what I needed to be doing.  2 days later I was at Ace hardware picking up parts, ordering stuff from coolchip.com (defunct).  Here are some pics of what the final setup was:

Sorry for the small pics, over the term of 3 years I seem to have lost some of the higher resolution ones. The system was a Celeron 300A running at 504Mhz on a Soyo 6BA+ Motherboard.    The Radiator was an old condenser from a online surplus store.   The block was just a cross drilled aluminum block from CoolChip.com (defunct).  The pump was a MagDrive 250Gph from a local pet store.  When this machine was built it was still pretty cutting edge since places like Overclockers Hideout were still selling their rigs with buckets of ice and not even radiators at that point.

This was also a point where the Athlons just came out, and the heat they were producing was scary for OC'rs.   The only options for high end cooling were really the big Alpha Slot A HSF's or water cooling. I saw this as a very fun challenge and after seeing FrostyFox take his athlon 500 to 900 Mhz had me drooling to start playing with Pelts or just plain water.

Weeks after doing the cooling article on TritiumTech.com I purchased the site URL's ProCooling.com and PCCooling.com for the intent to build a website just about cooling since this was really the stuff that interested me, and what I found the most fun.  TrituimTech disappeared once I setup Kicksomeass.com to run the Tribes clan I helped run back then.  Fun fact: 4 months after buying the site name TritiumTech.com I was almost sued by a company who claimed I "stole" the name from them. After they realized they were dumb shits, all was good. :) ( Steve and Kyle from HardOCP did help me quite a bit back then ( and with ProCooling in the beginning) and may have been the main reason the company backed off from me.)

ProCooling.com (V1.0) - (December 1999) The fun and games begin

into a business since I didn't know if I could dedicate the time to it as a business with customers and such.

I chose to turn the site into a cooling site, and based off the booming success in early 2000 that all the tech news sites and review sites were seeing, I wanted a piece of that action!  One thing many people who run websites will tell you is "I didn't get into it for the money" and that's more than likely true now.  But I think almost everyone starts up their site dreaming of big money just flowing in the door for a banner, or a link or something. It takes about 15 min for that dream to be smashed, which is good cause if it took longer it would have been just too damn painful. When I put the front page up with some little POS counter at the bottom, in 2 weeks I saw there was 2000 "hits" !!  Now as most web noobs think "Wow! 2000 hits! WOW!" hehehe ( I am cracking up as I am writing this). I called all the big mfgs, from Tyan, to Intel, to AMD saying "we got 2000 hits! can you send me some hardware!?" That's the 15 minutes where I realized my place in the whole web thing... So after that nasty blow to my ego and realizing that I was going about this all wrong and would be seriously disappointed if I kept running like that, I chose to run the site for fun, and if it breaks even, that's cool. I then started writing for the site, and I was already into my new cooling plan - Project Double Header.

Before getting the project started I wrote up 2 quick articles first about "Cooling The Chips" This was about cooling stuff besides the CPU. At this point the cooling industry had already started growing fast on providing products to cool the CPU, but I saw a big flaw that no one was cooling the other very hot chips in the system ( North Bridge/Video).  Today its common place, but back then I received e-mails from people telling me I was "Your stupid, no one needs to cool their video card with water! dumb ass." Heheh so looking back it seems that one of us was wrong :). Here's a pic of the small "micro cooler" I constructed:

I had a Tyan Thunder 100GX motherboard sitting around and thought I should use it, this is where Project Double Header came in.   It was basically taking the existing setup I had on The TritiumTech rig and turning it up a notch to cool 2 P2 450's @ 504 ( Mobo Limitation).

The original article was lost in a data conversion well over 2 years ago, but I still have pictures of the project and here are a few of them.

For its time this was somewhat cutting edge but was not a big OC or anything like that.  This was just a bigger cooling system than most have run.    I still use that motherboard and CPU's in one of my servers in my apt :). All the parts of the cooling system are still around here also.

There was one big change that happened to that setup a few months later, it was converted to all 3/8" hose.

From that point there was other articles covering misc. and basic cooling functionality such as bleeding a cooling system, or rebuilding a Mag Drive pump.  Project Double Header II started soon after, and was accompanied with the launch of the new ProCooling site design.

ProCooling moves onto bigger and better things!