I think they should have splashed some nitrogen on some of those flash ads. Gives me a headcahe just looking at the main page.

Also makes my Thinkpad screech to a crawl.

Oh well, I bet it'll get really good time in Seti.

reading things like these I'm reminded of the good old days where all you had to do was getting two 333MHz celerons, overclock them to 500MHz by upping the FSB, some socket-to-slot adaptors and *baddabing* you had a total of 1GHz for a bargain while using normals coolers. Was that only 3 or 4 years ago? *sigh*

P4 to 5.25GHz with Liquid Nitrogen.

In other news...

A rose achieved 3.7GHz and a segment of rubber hose was clocked to 7.5GHz. A red rubber ball, however was unable to surpass 300 MHz befor shattering.

The question is, how fast did it play solitaire once Windoze was booted?

I have an Athlon that seems to be growing warts. Will this take care of that as well?

Custom copper cooling head? That's a bong if I've ever seen one.

This is a amusing article, but kind of misses the point. So one problem with running processors faster is that they get too hot and we can get around that by cooling it with liquid nitrogen. Cool, but CPU heat is just one design element contributing to the effective speed of the computer.

This is like saying that I should cool my VW with liquid nitrogen so that I can run the engine faster. Sure, I'll pick up some speed, but honestly there are lots of other factors preventing my VW from running at a more productive speed than how fast I can get the engine spinning. The shape (like the bus on a PC), the steering (peripherals), and mostly that the cops don't appreciate me going 328mph through the school zone.

I'm not sure, but a better use of industrial gases might be this [dansdata.com] and probably would provide more perceived results.

(speaking as an ex LOX, LH2 and LN2 piping designer, of course, YMMV)

Heh, this looks like a lot of fun, but that board's not going to last long. Look at the picture on the first page. See the capacitors next to the socket with little ice crystals growing on them? Those are electrolytic caps; they use a liquid electrolyte which doesn't take kindly to being frozen solid. I'm amazed they didn't split open. Colder isn't always better; some components will simply fail at liquid-N2 temperatures. At least they took steps to deal with condensation.

With all that fancy talk about tolerances and only one company in the world that could make the aparatus, you'd think it would be bit fancier... Nope, just a coper plate with a copper tube sticking up off of it that you fill with nitrogen, and it cools via evaperation. I could build it with some 2-inch copper pipe, a torch, and some soldier... 5 GHz is cool and all, but come on, is there really the need to make it sound so difficult?

Yes, I got 6.58Ghz out of my 1.2Ghz Intel Celeron. Image1 [geocities.com]

Its a true screenshot. What isn't true is the actual clock... I ran some ASM that had a typo in it, and it somehow accelerated the windows timer, thus making apps see my CPU as something faster.

Even more amazing is what 3D mark 03 sees. Yes, to that program, I have a 60.1Ghz processor (not a typo)

Image 2 [geocities.com]

And I didn't even have to use any more cooling than the laptops normal fan.

Any Questions? ;)

NeoThermic

This overclocking stuff is REALLY stupid to the point of insanity. My conclusion is that it's a weird fantasy about the lone DIY (do-it-yourself) tinkerer.

First, consider the economic side. For all of the special efforts and costs needed to cool down, test, and monitor an overclocked CPU, you could just buy a couple more for the same speedup effect. No special anything required. At the same time, there is no real need for all those cycles--we have a glut of cycles now. If it were really cost-effective to overclock and use special cooling systems, then the very few people who actually do need lots and lots of cycles would be using overclocking for their supercomputers--and they don't. They just buy more CPUs and run them the way they were designed.

The design question leads to the second point. Building a modern CPU is not a hobby for amateurs. It is an incredibly complicated device involving the efforts of large teams of very clever people using very fancy design tools. No one person could even know all the details of a modern CPU. Far too many details. They may know some of the higher level features, or know a lot of detail about a tiny section, but no one really understands all of it. However, they are doing the best they can to insure that it will work reliably, and that includes MANY design considerations that are related to the clock speed.

So back to my main conclusion: Overclocking is a fantasy of the DIY tinkerer "beating" the experts. Actually, it's nice when it happens, but overclocking is NOT one of those cases. The overclockers fantacize about some form of "delivering more bang for the buck", but they are competing directly against professionals with the same goal. The pros win, especially in Intel's case where their development costs per CPU are almost negligible. As the joke goes, "The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that's the way to bet." The overclockers already lost. (By the way, I think this is also an expecially American fantasy, a kind of "independence" thing, and that there are very few non-American overclockers.)

One more technical aspect as a fairly concrete example. Overclocked computers can become unreliable. Many overclockers limit their testing to "Does it boot and seem to run the OS properly?" However, the OS is not using the floating point resources the same way that true numeric applications do. The machine may seem okay as far as the OS is concerned, but actually be producing gibberish results. (There was actually a probable example of this published by seti@home. I'm tempted to diverge into the psychological relationships there...)

Ergo, I've never heard of Intel hiring someone for their expertise in overclocking, and I don't expect to.

But does "Tom's Hardware" sound like a gay porn site name

I saw this article over lunch today, and when I checked back just now I noticed they'd removed the page of benchmarks. One of the interesting results shown was that the Athlon 64 FX-51 managed to beat this overclocked behemoth in a couple tests.

Only one or two, mind you, but it still boggles the mind that this Pentium running 2.5x faster than the Athlon chip didn't utterly dominate all comers.

Given the history of THG and their decidedly negative (some might say Intel-funded) view of the Athlon 64 chips, it's not particularly surprising they'd choose to pull that page, but it does cast further doubt on the continued relevance of what was once a high-quality tech reporting site.

The few posts questioning this on the THG forums seem to have disappeared in the time it took me to write this. Strange...

1. Now this P4 is so fast that you can get a Windows Blue Screen of Death within seconds of booting it up!
2. Watch it still lose to a Dual G5 in Photoshop bakeoffs.
3. Check out this line from Page 11: " At this clock rate, however, benchmark tests were no longer possible." In other words, this overclocked beauty doesn't actually work at that speed! If it's too unstable to use for real software, it hardly counts as a real innovation.

From the THG story [tomshardware.com]:

With just weeks to go to Christmas, the THG crew got together to offer our loyal readers and especially the hardcore geeks among us something really special. Our brainstorming session quickly lead to extreme overclocking.

Oh the creativity -- it's blinding! A computer hardware website investigating overclocking!

This is basically dumping liquid nitrogen onto processors outside and clocking them up. There's not much of an achivement there. You can soak LEDs in liquid nitrogen and make them do all sorts of interesting tricks too. Whoop.

Why not wait until someone comes up with a indoor version, properly vented and pumped, with a compressor cycle that you can actually use on a long-term basis? That would be an achivement I'd like to see. Of course, it's orders of magnitude more difficult and dangerous, too.

Liquid Nitrogen is cold when it's evaporating. You want it to be cold? Give it a flat surface to evaporate on, and keep pouring on the Nitrogen.

Basically, if you lay a piece of Saran Wrap on your motherboard, then let the LN2 drip on the CPU constantly, you can cool that bastard to -195.798C.

Making a big, tall tower just looks like a stupid Freudian mistake.

Sorry Germans. No wonder they've lost every war they ever started.

I wonder if you can attach quad monitors, quad mice and keyboards, and have a lanparty on once CPU. I know the radeon 9800 can go that far and already does miltiple monitors, I know of X projects to use multiple USB mice simultaneously and possibly multiple USB keyboards too.

hmmmmmmmmmm`

Hmm. Safety gloves? Protective glasses?

You can definitely tell that these are computer geeks, and not chemistry geeks. Liquid nitrogen is remarkably safe stuff to play with, unless you're deeply stupid about it.