Pushing P4 to 5.25GHz with Liquid Nitrogen 311
SkywalkerOS8 writes "The folks at Tom's Hardware have an article up about their attempt to overclock a Pentium 4 over 5 GHz using liquid nitrogen as cooling. A DivX video is available along with pictures of the custom copper cooling head they made."
Abuse of Industrial Gases (Score:4, Informative)
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)
Re:Letter from the Editor (Score:2, Informative)
The capacitors have liquid in them, he was mentioning the ice crystals to identify them. Try reading the parent again.
Sincerely,
Me.
Re:Talk about journalistic integrity! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:cost? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:freezer (Score:3, Informative)
So they took refrigerators and removed all of the shelving from the interior, drilled holes through the side (around the coolant tubes) to bring in power cables, data cables and such (the holes were then filled with expanding foam to make them airtight), and plugged it in.
They said that every time they visited the site, everywhere else was dusty and dirty (and hot). Inside the fridge, it was cool (10c) and dust-free.
Cheap way of making sure that things in remote locations stay working
After watching those videos, I can't help but wonder why they were blocking out part of the screen on the CPU-ID program. What could've been so super-top-secret there?
N.
People unclear on the concept. (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Like trying to overclock a VW (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Like trying to overclock a VW (Score:3, Informative)
He said: I should cool my VW with liquid nitrogen so that I can run the engine faster
Heh, that's easy - use an air/water Ic and stick ice in the reservoir.
Re:5+ GHz (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Overclocking is stupid--No, make that "insane" (Score:3, Informative)
A few years ago, I (and a lot of other people), bought a Celeron 366A for $70, and overclocked it by changing the frontside bus speed from 66MHz (the default for Celerons) to 100MHz (the default for Pentium 3s), making it run at 550MHz. The fastest available P3 at the time was 550MHz, and it cost something like $500.
This took about a minute to do, didn't require any extra cooling (except for $2 worth of thermal paste on the stock heatsink), and the chip has run flawlessly since then, giving me within 5% of the performance of a P3 550MHz in most applications.
To summarize, I bought $500 worth of performance for $70. Or, I saved myself $430 by overclocking.
Thousands of other people took advantage of this same underselling, it was a huge deal at the time. (Others might recount tales of overclocking the Celeron 300A to 450MHz in similar fashion -- it was a 'good year' for those chips.) Intel was selling these chips underclocked so as not to cut into the profits from the more expensive chips. (Today, in the case of new Celerons, they sell them with sky-high clock speeds to mask the fact that they've got horrificly poor performance.)
Part of the draw was that you didn't have to buy some fancy heatsink or run your motherboard at some strange frequency, or have to have any idea what you're doing beyond a few simple steps.
It's not usually quite that easy, and it's you're less likely to get the same 30%-50% clock speed gains with today's GHz+ chips, but there are still plenty of opportunities to get top-of-the-line performance from middle-tier chips without much cost or effort. Every time I build a new system, I look around to see whether any current chips in my price range are good overclockers. Sometimes there are, sometimes there aren't.
My point is that not all overclocking is the same. What Tom's Hardware, and a lot of other enthusiast sites do is just 'experimenting' to get the most performance out of what is already among the fastest and most expensive chips out there.
The article bills itself as a 'record attempt', not something practical or cost-effective. There is (as I've described) cost- and time-effective overclocking, but when someone breaks out the liquid nitrogen, it's pretty obvious that they're doing it just for fun.
Ergo, I've never heard of Intel hiring someone for their expertise in overclocking, and I don't expect to.
That's among the stupidest things I have ever heard. That's exactly what Intel and AMD do! Intel especially is focused on ramping up clock speed to get more performance out of the same basic chip. The only difference is that they control over more variables in the process. Sometimes it's in the design phase, but a lot of the incremental speed ups (From say 2.5GHz to 2.6GHz) come from just cranking the clock speed up and seeing if it still works. That's overclocking if you ask me. They just happen to be the ones that decide (when they lock the multiplier and label the chip) what's "over" and what's not.
If that doesn't work, they rely on refinements in the manufacturing to give them more headroom. When they overshoot and make chips that can run much faster than they want to sell them -- well, that's where the overclockers come in.
This really isn't special at all. (Score:2, Informative)
http://son.t-next.com/
THG likes to say they do everything first, when in fact their p4 wasn't even stable at 5ghz. only 4.7ghz.
And yes. It is excessive.
-Zoson
Error in calculations (Score:2, Informative)