The overclocking world goes through its ups and downs. Sadly, we must report some unfortunate findings for the Boreas Thermoelectric Cooling unit designed by CoolIT of Canada.

We did not notice that these thermoelectric coolers were "disappearing" from the shelves of CoolIT's American distributors as we continued to tout the benefits of cooling using Peltier devices. The future of Peltier controlled cooling looked bright, and the integrated Boreas cooling chasis was perfect. Temperatures were nice and cool, overclocks in the 4.3 to 4.5 GHz range were routinely achieved by the i7-920 and i7-860 chips being tested, and there was no need to deal with all of unpleasantries of using a water-based cooling solution.

This bubble was about to burst. When our intrepid overclocker from the west coast, "Buckeye" Bill, opened the Boreas unit we ordered through PerformancePCS.com this is what he saw:



Even a novice can spot the three "feet" missing from the bottom of the case sitting there in the foreground. Ummm.... Weren't these supposed to be secured to the base? The box was wobbling right out of the... well, box! And, it gets worse from there.

The case was very dusty. It looked like it had suffered a fair share of wear and tare. It didn't take long to realize there were also parts missing from the shipment. Missing were the USB cables, the CPU mounting hardware, and the temperature control unit. In fact, this whole thing looked like an RMA (returned merchandise) from a previous customer who sent it back to PerformancePCS.com and later this was discovered to be the case.



The untrained eye might not recognize what is being shown in the pictures above. That is the CPU block itself, without the required protective covering. You can also see how badly it is scratched and pitted, and the true overclocker is probably asking "Where is the thermal compound?" that is very clearly unapplied in this case. There is no way that this "hatchet job" should have been sent to us.

Since PerformancePCS.com is just a distributor of CoolIT, who actually built the cooler, they did what anybody in their situation would do: They blamed CoolIT, claiming it was sent "like this" to them. Amazing how the people at PerformancePCS.com didn't bother to inspect what they sent to us.



Buckeye "took it up a notch" and tried to fix the problem for them. They were shipping not only subcompents to him, but now specially made wires and connectors designed to his custom specifications, as you can see from his diagrammed figure above. Extra credit to Bill for not giving up on this impossible situation; "F-" in customer support for PerformancePCS.com and their handling of the situation.

This was just the tip of the iceberg. The integrated controller was failing to cool one of the four CPUs on this i7-920 build. Ignoring that, the temperatures that were being reached just were not going to enable us to reach our previous overclocks at 4.5 GHz. What was going on? How could such a "good thing" that worked fine for months go so bad all of a sudden?

The ball goes back to CoolIT's court for this one. Apparently they could not ramp up their production and still maintain the same Quality Control they had while they were a smaller business entity. They received a few million dollars (Canadian) from a venture capital firm in the first half of 2009, and I suspect they instructed them to "pull the plug" on their line of Peltier coolers that could just not be made "perfectly" and cost effectively in larger quantity.

It was tough to get CoolIT to give us all of the details. All that we were told was that there would be no more Thermoelectric coolers coming from them at least through August of 2010, and maybe even later. This was not what we needed to hear, as our own focus groups indicated there was pent-up demand for systems that could hit 4.5 GHz and orders were still coming in for them. Silently withdrawing their product from their distributors without letting the rest of us know what was going on was a really bad move. I have to give an "F-" in "full disclosure" to CoolIT for this one.

So now Liquid Nitrogen Overclocking has reversed our position on the Peltier Cooling solutions that have served us so well for the first half of 2010. We will continue to pursue cost effective ways to achieve speeds of 4.5 to 5.0 GHz using other cooling solutions, and we will revisit Peltier cooling as stable controller technology becomes available.