Swiftech has pioneered unique methods to cool down
hardware components. They can easily be compared to various competitors
in terms of air-cooling but when it comes to Thermoelectric and
Water-Cooling Swiftech is hard to beat. They have engineered some
of the best cooling devices found in the market today. To further
inform you about their accomplishments we decided to reprint their
history below.
Swiftech was founded in 1994 by Gabriel Rouchon
as a Maintenance and R&D Organization for high-end Unix computers
and imaging systems.
Early 1998 when Intel® Corporation introduced
the Celeron®, we immediately became heavily involved in overclocking.
Our engineering background allowed us to develop our own cooling
solutions, using OEM products with the introduction of the MC2
sandwich cooler. By the fall of 98, we realized that air cooling
was not going to satisfy our clients ever increasing need for
speed, and during the course of investigating thermo-electric
(Peltier) cooling technology, we immediately recognized the potential
application to CPU cooling.
Since there was no serious implementation of
this technology commercially available to the personal computer
industry, we started our own assembly, focusing on engineering
specs rather than economics. The result was the first commercially
available Active Cooler using thermo-electric technology to actually
perform as intended: the MC1000, introduced in the spring of 99,
which quickly became a world standard.
The year 2000 became a turning point in our
growth. AMD had just introduced their latest generation Duron
and TBird processors, Intel® was coming out with the Pentium®
4, and these new processors radiated twice as much heat as their
predecessors. Because we had engineered heatsinks capable of dissipating
the combined heat generated by a CPU and a Peltier element, we
found ourselves in an excellent position to offer high-end, air-cooled
solutions to dissipate the heat generated by these new processors.
A string of articles written by leading hardware review sites
on the Internet recognized Swiftech socket coolers as the most
effective cooling solutions available on the market. Following
the sky-rocketing demand, we developed our own manufacturing facility
in Southern California in the fall of 2000.
Swiftech is now 20 people strong, and operates
in a 6,000 Sq Ft facility located in Signal Hill (Southern California).
All our heatsinks and water cooling solutions are entirely machined
on site, using state-of-the-art CNC equipment. Total control of
our manufacturing tool allows us to pay particular attention to
critical quality items such as:
- High thermal conductivity materials including
C110 copper, 6063 and 1100 aluminum alloys
- Exceptional heatsink base flatness (better
than .001") and micro surface finish (8 MSF or better)
Since many users are moving to water-cooling nowadays
we decided to review Swiftech’s newly released MCW5000-A
water-block for both AMD and Intel processors. How does it perform?
Read on and find out.
