A cooling system for cooling air in a rack mounted equipment such as computer systems. The cooling system includes a split and staggered cooling system where the cooling is carried out by two different parallel coolers. One of the coolers is pressed against the walls of the cooling duct, but allows some amount of the air to pass around the cooler. The output of that first cooler is also constricted to a similar amount as the air output that passes around the first cooler. The second cooler is downstream of the first cooler, and receives all the air that passes around the first cooler and provides cooling to that air. In this way, two different split coolers can be used to cool the air stream.