Interview: OC legend Vince "Kingpin" Lucido

It is no secret that cooling is one of the keys to pushing the envelope in extreme overclocking and benchmarking competitions. Nobody arguably makes better LN2 [liquid nitrogen] containers than Kingpin Cooling. If you by any chance wonder why the company is named Kingpin Cooling and Vince's nick is k|ng|pin, the reason is quite simple - try to register the company using non-standard alphabet character and you'll be in for a ride. In this extensive interview, K|ngp|n spoke with BSN* while recovering from some very painful tattoo work.

BSN*:  What was your first experience with computers?
k|ngp|n:  It was with an IBM PC, which was quite a while ago, which my parents got me. I fiddled around with it; played some games but the games were super-weak back then. I actually wrote a few little mod programs or little animations which I did when I was younger, like nine or ten. Then I got into action sports like skateboarding and snowboarding and went away from computers for a while.

BSN*:  When and why did you start to overclock? Can you remember what system it was?
k|ngp|n:  When I first got back into computers, I got into Unreal Tournament. I don't remember where I was; I think I was at a friend's house. So I went and bought a computer, a HP prebuilt gaming computer. I set up and started playing games, pretty much spent all my time online playing games; 5, 6, 7 hours a day and sometimes even longer. And every once in a while my computer would start running really badly and I started to visit sites like Xtreme Systems and Futuremark. I visited mostly just those sites but I did visit some AMD based sites. It was mostly to get my computer to run as fast as possible.

BSN*:  What prompted you to start using extreme cooling?
k|ngp|n:  I really liked phase change, you just set up the unit and you can sit back and relax. Because I was playing games it was more practical, you don't have to worry about it, you don't have to babysit the pots but it was not reliable for overclocking. I started getting into cascades and the cascades started breaking. There is always some issue with the load temps, some line breaking. I eventually started to realize that benching out of containers whether they are dry ice or liquid nitrogen [LN2] would be better. But I went to LN2 right away, I did use dry ice but you're limited, you can only use so much of it. So why even bother? I chose to go with LN2 because I could go as cold or as long as I wanted. I basically could control the temperatures and just keep them at whatever I wanted by a combination of sitting there and babysitting the pot and controlled pouring. I could keep the CPU temp at one degree below where the thing [CPU] shuts off and if it meant 100 more MHz, why the hell wouldn't I? I then started to work on containers with a lot more buffer on the bottom. Massive, massive buffered designs so the temperature swing would be really slow and I realized it would be really easy to keep within a certain temperature. So, it was just an evolution I guess.

BSN*:  Are there any people in the overclocking community you look up to or respect?
k|ngp|n: There are a lot of guys I have respect for and I hold these guys in thehighest regard:  Guys like Shamino, Giorgio, hipro5 and OPPAINTER, eventhough he's not very active anymore - the guy was really an inspirationto me in a lot of ways. All of Team Japan pretty much. I mean thoseguys are sick.  Everything they do is sick. Those guys were doingtemperature control long before I was. They just didn't post about it alot but I can tell they knew what was up. I based a lot of my earlydesigns off of what they did. I consider those guys ground breakers forsure. You've got to mention Macci. I got to bench with him for thefirst time at QuakeCon. He's so cool, such a cool dude - soknowledgeable and technical.  He's definitely someone I hold in highregard.

BSN*:  Do you have a result or world record that you're most proud of?
k|ngp|n:  I don't know man. Some stick out like when I got a 100K on 3DMark 01, that was pretty cool. A lot of my [3DMark] 01 scores I'm pretty happy with because they took a lot of work. A lot of the stuff I've been doing with Shamino lately, it's just been insane. He's awesome; I absolutely love benching with that guy. It's just fun benching with someone who's on the same level, now I'm not saying I'm on the same level as Shamino, he's a modding god, but as far as me and him benching, we both bench very hard. We're both pretty much always on the same page. We just work really well together. Pretty much all the stuff with him really sticks out.