The Big Chiller

You might say CEO Al Quick understands the importance of keeping cool. In 1996, the early retiree from NCR was chilling out on his yacht when five former colleagues lured him into a project to develop the "world's fastest" personal computer. The plan: a patented refrigeration process that keeps a microprocessing chip cooled to subzero temperatures (-40C). That makes it run 35%-to-40% faster than chips in a conventional air-cooled PC.

It took only a year for KryoTech Inc., the first startup to be incubated at the University of South Carolina, to move off campus. And by last November they were ready: 70 employees at the West Columbia (S.C.) company began cranking out 20 SuperGs a week--essentially a PC tower mounted on an air-conditioning subsystem. Nearly as fast as a supercomputer, the SuperG retails at about $2,450. Industry analyst Tom Pabst, publisher of Tom's Hardware Guide, hails it as "the first consumer PC to hit the streets at the magical 1 GHz (gigahertz)"--a breakthrough billion cycles of electricity per second. (Industry leader Intel Corp. doesn't expect to have its version out until later this year.) That was good enough to win KryoTech a place in the permanent research collection of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.