Optimus comes from an ultra-precision Chicago-based machining company with over 50 years of experience crafting precision parts for numerous industries with exacting tolerances. Our history includes making parts for everything from emergency ventilators and surgical devices to fiber fusion splicers and heavy machinery hydraulics. Much like liquid cooling, but for keeping people alive and airplanes in flight.

In fact, Optimus's founding company machined parts for the Lunar Roving Vehicle (LVR) electric motor drive train. Since none of the rovers returned, our parts are still up there, ready to be driven again, assuming you bring a power bank or two. And while there are no open loop PCs on the moon (yet), being a tiny part of a legendary engineering effort makes us want to take precision manufacturing into new industries.

Like many engineers and tech fans, building PCs is in our bones. We've been building PCs for years. And, like many, In the quest for the highest performance, we soon ran into issues with current liquid cooling options on the market. Namely, reliability, quality, precision.

And after years of buying, building, modding and tweaking the vast majority of the products on the market, we came to one conclusion: we gotta build this stuff ourselves. After hundreds of prototypes, we were able to achieve industry-leading overclocking results and benchmarks in numerous categories. Combined with our background in manufacturing, we knew we had to create a new brand to make US-made ultra-precision PC cooling a reality.

Most importantly, our experience in aerospace gave a unique window into what PC liquid cooling was doing right and wrong. Very few products are actually safe for plain distilled water. Flaky electrolytic nickel, o-rings with plasticizer, extruded acrylic that cracks are not professional materials.

And it's not that big of a surprise. Current PC liquid cooling was a niche hobby industry, not a performance/reliability industry. Home Depot and aquarium shops were the original open loop stores. So issues of galvanic corrosion and plasticizer plagued liquid cooling for years but were unheard of in professional industries like surgical and aerospace.

Still, bad practices abound in liquid cooling. As PC gaming has grown in recent years, the market has become flooded with new products. The quest for lower prices and fancier LEDs has caused a drop in quality, even if the PCs they're cooling are more and more expensive with incredible performance.