Interview: OC legend Vince "Kingpin" Lucido

Kingpin Cooling - How LN2 cooling is becoming a business

BSN*:  Let's talk about Kingpin Cooling. Are you devoting full-time to Kingpin Cooling?
k|ngp|n: I'd say it's almost full-time work, it's approaching that. I spend halfof the day answering e-mails, answering PMs, packing stuff, going tothe post office and making parts and sometimes I'll do all that andI'll stay up all night long. I used to stay up all night longoverclocking but now I'll stay up all night making GPU units or CPUunits just trying to keep up with everything. I still do mostlyeverything by myself. I have one main guy. He's like my main man; he'slike my tech machine guy that helps me out with a lot of stuff; likeharder setups and new designs and things of that nature. But for themost part, I'm doing everything and sometimes it can be difficult. Ibarely have time to overclock anymore, which kinda sucks.


Kingpin Cooling lineup: CPU and GPU pots with numerous adapters

BSN*:  Would you say overall your venture is worth it, in terms of your life then vs. now?
k|ngp|n:  I'm not sure yet, to be honest. It bummed me out when somebody would copy one of my pots. Or not really copy it, but make something very, very similar or sort of push it as a cheap knockoff of one of mine. I worked really hard to get to this point and it just pisses me off. Sometimes when that [my pots get ripped off] happens I regret it, but for the most part people believe in the things I make and it always seems to carry through. I mean my business has gone up incredibly, you know not huge or anything. I definitely think that's because of the bad world economy, but it's gone up. It's never gone down, which is a good sign for overclocking in general.

BSN*: The Dragon F1 Extreme Edition LN2 pot is legendary. Can you share your thoughts on the pot?
k|ngp|n:  Once I realized that temperature with LN2 can easily be controlled, by hand and by manual pouring. I started to make my containers with a more and more buffered type of design on the bottom of the base. This is basically designed to keep the temperatures from swinging really fast. The temperature control is unbelievable.


Dragon F1 Extreme Edition kit

Way more surface area and it's got so much mass that it's not swinging all over the place. If you have a processor that requires a specific temperature not a degree colder, especially with Intel CPUs and I see it a lot, then your bench is screwed. That can be avoided with my fine tuning of the Dragon F1 EE pot. That's how the F1 was born. I knew I had something good when guys that had never used LN2 before were telling me that it was so easy to maintain a specific set temperature on many processors.  Especially quads [quad-core CPUs], like in 3DMark 06 or 3DMark Vantage when you hit the CPU portion of the test, it will fully load all the threads or cores on the chips and that thing heats up. At the time 3DMark06 came out, all the containers around sucked. They were like, not to put anybody's early work down, any pioneer-type guys, it's just they [the LN2 pots] weren't good. I mean, you hit the CPU test and it will just warm up and you are at the mercy of the unit. But with my unit, it was different, because I figured with the base's mass not only could you control temperatures, but if you added the right amount of surface area you could also get the temperatures to dynamically change as needed. So if the CPU is bucking from putting a little bit more watt, you can put a little bit more LN 2 in and the CPU will run a little higher. It's 100% about controlling temps.

BSN*: Your newest LN2 pot is Venom. What is the theory behind Venom's design vs. what the F1 accomplished?
k|ngp|n:   Ok, well, the Venom pots are more about…I needed more horsepower, basically. The F1, with the Phenom II I noticed that when you get around 6.1, 6.2, and 6.3 GHz with 1.8 voltage during those CPU tests it starts warming up. Not a lot, but it's warming up. A full copper design does not give a chip a chip like the Phenom II what it needs. LN2 isn't even enough because it can go colder. So even one or two degrees will get you megahertz that equal greater scores. So I just started making pots with…first I tried to find out how much copper was actually needed to do this project and then I started working on the amount of surface area need to get to the point where the CPU doesn't warm up. It's basically what you want on your benchmarks, colder temperatures that don't change. And that's the best you can do with LN2. If you have an LN2 container that can do that there's not much more you can do especially when the [CPU] chip is fully loaded up in Vantage, 06 or wPrime, you know, something like that. The shape of the Venom is me basically trying to get as much volume into the inside of the container as possible and that's why it's so large. Future revisions might shrink down in some dimensions, but for the most part, it's going to be almost the same because I know it works. That's really the most important thing; as long as it works, I could care less about how it looks. Looks is not a primary consideration, it's more of a secondary or third consideration. Once I get the performance of the pot the way I want I want it and then I'm usually set.

BSN*:  Tell me about the Tek Slim GPU pots...  
k|ngp|n:  My Tek GPU units, I think the number one thing is universality. I don't know if that's a word actually.


Tek-5 Slim v5.0 LN2 pots for numerous ATI and nVidia cards, even dual-GPU ones

They're really universal, because you work with so many different cards and that's what I like about them. I could make a different pot for every single video card, but I mean, who the heck is going to buy them? So this pot is really, really universal. It's good, it's a good pot. It works well, it's designed to work with cards at very high loads and it gives you that excellent feel of just nice, rock stable temps. The card is loaded up, the pot is full of LN2 it isn't difficult to control the card. That's it.

BSN*: And rounding up your selection is the NB-1 Northbridge LN2 pot.
k|ngp|n:  I just wanted to make one because a lot of people have been asking me for them. I wanted something that would work with a nice range of motherboards. So we came up with the classic design that's pretty universal. It works with a nice range [of motherboards] and I started testing some copper ones, tested some half copper, half aluminum and I tested some full aluminum ones. I found the aluminum ones were pretty dang good. There's really not a lot of heat coming off of Northbridge chips even at really high voltages. It's not anything like CPUs. You don't need that much. That container, it's cheap and it's good and that's really what I set out to do.

BSN*:  Speaking of shape, I've noticed several users on XS and maybe elsewhere wonder why your pots are square rather than round.
k|ngp|n:  It's funny that you say that, some of the other people have said it to me too and I never even think about it man. I mean I just don't do round pots. There's really no specific reason for it. I mean in the Venom's case, that pot is square for a reason. Because I needed to get, I needed to basically the thing to be as big as possible to get such a big area. The only way to do that was with that particular square shape. Obviously, a round shape…you can actually get a round container to actually be bigger, but it wouldn't fit most of the [main] boards. That's a problem. So I wanted to make that container as big and as massive as possible with no limit; just full throttle [benchmarking]. So with the F1, I don't know. I mean that's the shape that I originally started testing. I have some really early prototypes that are actually round. They don't work as great but they have slightly different internals so it's not an apple to apples comparison. I started doing square prototypes and after a couple square prototypes it did really well and I just kinda got a good vibe from it. That's just how I made my containers plus I have a CNC mill [computer numerical controlled], it's a lot easier to make square pots than round.