Net-N-Dude Glacier 4500C Arctic Cap Celeron Cooler

Before the days of the Food & Drug Administration and before the days of extreme governmental regulation of the products that would make it to the market in the US it was almost encouraged to market your own "cure-all" get rich quick products to take advantage of the "ignorant" consumer. In the early 1900's products ranging from pills that would cure cancer to drinks that would make you smarter found their way into the hands of the uninformed consumer. This has unfortunately been the case with most CPU cooler manufacturers in recent times, with the general trend of thought being that the more fans present on a heatsink, the higher you can push the limits of your processor. While this can be called a notably simplified rule of thumb for cooling, it is far from the truth, and unfortunately, many unsuspecting buyers are falling for it.

The introduction of Intel's Celeron processor in 1998 brought new meaning to the word "overclocking." While the relatively small overclocking market nearly fainted at the sight of the original 266MHz Celeron processors running at 400MHz+, the even more popular Celeron 300A running at 450MHz captured more attention than any single x86 processor among those that were interested in harnessing the power of the overclocking wonder-chip. But as the old axiom has come to show us all time and time again, what goes up must come down. In this case, the once almost guaranteed overclockable Celeron 300A processors are growing scarce in the market and are quickly being replaced by the relatively untouchable 366 and 400MHz processors which seem to max out at around the 450MHz mark.

With the difficulty of finding Celeron 300As that overclock to 450MHz any more, most online vendors have turned to testing their own Celeron 300As at 450MHz and selling overclocked 450MHz bundles at a premium price, while still keeping the cost lower than that of a Pentium II 450. After a few more weeks of shortages, those 450MHz combos began to die out, and users turned to other, more unorthodox methods of getting the most bang for their buck at 450MHz from a sub $80 processor. Most CPU cooler manufacturers quickly picked up on the vulnerability of users that would do anything to hit that 450MHz mark with their Celeron 300A processors, and thus the race for the most obnoxiously large Celeron cooling heatsink/fan combo had begun.

Net-N-Dude, one of the pioneers of the multiple fan Celeron cooling solution, released their Glacier 4500C product a while back. The Glacier 4500C features triple 4500 RPM cooling fans, and a full sized heatsink that fits over the entire SEPP Celeron card. Since the only part of the Celeron generating heat is the processor itself, the large heatsink allows for the heat generated by the processor to be quickly spread out and removed via the three 4500RPM fans. The fans then take in cool air from the case and use it to funnel the rising heat off of the heatsink. The problem with this design was the fact that although the top of the processor was being cooled quite effectively, the processor still generated enough heat to cause instability and therefore another method of heat removal was necessary.