This is a mixture of older shots, some water cooled PC’s and ‘work in progress’ shots of other builds.

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'First Contact' would have been the Atari VCS (Atari 2600) console in the late 70's followed by the ZX Spectrum in the early 80's (Jet Set Willy and Renegade being 2 games I remember on that one). Further fairly early memories were the Acorn Archimedes (notably the platform for the first Elite) and Atari ST owned by friends at the time. By the time of the 486DX and early Pentiums I was overclocking the CPU in a bid to improve graphics performance, probably for Doom and Duke Nukem 3D, they were about the right time. First steps in improving cooling involved removing the side panel of the case and having a desk fan pointing at the motherboard. 

 

The late 90's and early 2000's were an awesome time for gaming and computing more generally. AMD were riding the crest of a wave, their CPU's were running slower clock speeds than Intel at the time, but their short pipeline architecture was unbeatable for gaming and benchmarking. ATI and Nvidia were locked in their own arms race as well, the ATI Rage and early Radeon cards and the early Nvidia GeForce offerings frequently swapping position at the top of the performance pile. This was also the time that multiplayer gaming (at least in the FPS sense) became widespread, the first really competitive multiplayer games like Unreal Tournament, Quake 3, Call of Duty and Joint Operations were opening up to an ever-larger playerbase as Dial-Up modems were replaced with the early Broadband. As I was mainly playing a multiplayer hitscan game mode called Instagib (one shot instant kill) at the time (Quake 2 and UT99, then UT 2004), a good frame rate and ping could give you the edge over another player of otherwise similar skill. Thus started my real interest in Overclocking, trying to wring the very best performance out of the hardware available. 

 

With this improved performance though comes a downside, the faster you get a processor to run, the higher you need to bump up the voltage it runs at. This leads to much higher heat buildup, which in turn leads to instability and crashes. As air is not a particularly good conductor, I started experimenting with water cooling (and one period of a few months with a Refrigeration unit). This was a very specialist pursuit in the early 2000's, with little available 'off the shelf' hardware. The first few setups were very rudimentary, involving pond pumps and either small car radiators or more often oil coolers. A few companies (Danger Den and Swiftech being the first that I remember) were working on water cooling at the time, and over the next few years more dedicated hardware became available to actually have systems contained within a case, and I have photos available of some of my exploits from here on (under the Historic IT tab). The big project of the time was my AntiSFF (Anti Small Form Factor) case, which has its own page above, a truly custom build that saw a lot of time at the local LAN tournaments. Methodical working, good leak testing before and during installation, and not cutting corners on hardware allowed a 0% failure rate of components due to leaks. I confess I have lost a few peripherals and one laptop to drink spillage though...​​​​​​​​​​