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P4 2.2GHz Overclocked to 3.5GHz 328

Posted by CmdrTaco from the never-underestimate-the-power-of-nitrogen dept.
GraveD sent linkage to a site explaining how a homemade nitrogen cooling system overclocked a P4 from 2.2Ghz to an incredible 3.5ghz. There's plenty of stuff to poke at over there. Update: 01/17 20:42 GMT by T : boaworm writes: "According to this paper, the Finnish geeks have successfully oveclocked a Pentium 4 to 3675 Mhz. They claim it is a new World Record, and it sure looks like they beaten another O/C'd Pentium 4 submitted earlier today on slashdot. (Summary in English in the end)."
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P4 2.2GHz Overclocked to 3.5GHz More

P4 2.2GHz Overclocked to 3.5GHz

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  • I need details! How can I make a home-grown nitrogen cooling system and overclock the living daylights out of my system!!!
    • Right, I want technical details on how to do it too.

      Look at this CPU, the physical dimension and the heat it generates, are just perfect for making my omelette in the morning.
    • Easy, take the case of your system, take a big ass hollow copper tube, with a sealed copper base of course.
      Secure the base to the processor die with some arctic silver or other compound of your choice and some rope, wouldn't want a catsicle when fluffy knocks over your box.
      Fill said copper tube with liquid nitrogen, and a steady drip from your nitrogen storage container, it turns gaseous really fast.
      Boot system, enter bios, overclock to your hearts desire.
      (Just don't forget to take pictures of the rig, and take the heat sink off in a video would be cool too, I'd love to see a P4 3.5 drop the heat sink and become a P4 500Mhz or whatever in half a second.

  • Overclocking with super-cooling systems? (Score:5, Funny)

    by FortKnox ( 169099 ) on Thursday January 17, 2002 @02:25PM (#2856611) Homepage Journal
    Dude. Overclocking with a super-cooling system is sooo 1999!
    • Yeah, but what is its equivalent overclocked speed in Athlon MHz?

    • What about underclocking? (Score:5, Funny)

      by slickwillie ( 34689 ) on Thursday January 17, 2002 @08:17PM (#2859333)
      Why don't you guys ever have any articles on underclocking? Are underclockers really that bad? What are some of the advantages of underclocking?

      - Underclock a 2.0GHz to 1.0Ghz, and you can throw away your CPU fan.

      - Underclock to 500MHz and you can get rid of your case fan.

      - Underclock to 4.77Mhz and you can run older versions of Fligh Simulator.

      - Underclock to 4.0 MHz and you can pretend you are running a Z80.

      - Underclock too 100KHz and you can actually watch your instructions exeecute.
      • Underclocking is actually usefull. I used to work for a company that used embedded PC hardware, we used to routinely underclock chips when we knew that they would be going into very hot climates or in places where the ventilation would be poor.


      • I _really_ wish I can underclock my system (AMD XP 1900+)

        But how ?

        My mobo doesn't permit me to underclock it to 100 KHz.

        At least, I don't think it'd go that low.
      • Underclock too 100KHz

        Heh. You're just another wannabe underclocker.

        A real underclocker wires up his own hardware. Scavange a wall switch, mount it on the side of your keyboard, and run a line to the CPU CLOCK-IN.

        .31337 Hurts

        -
    • Insightful? Informative? Did those two even follow the link? Presumably the Funny moderator did.

      Sheeeet, I oughta donate all my karma to something usful, like advancements in cheese spreads.
    • Wow. there's got to be some kind of award for racking up this much moderation:

      Moderation Totals: Offtopic=3, Insightful=1, Informative=1, Funny=4, Overrated=1, Total=10.

      tcd004

  • Hope it's running the web server... (Score:5, Funny)

    by shanek ( 153868 ) on Thursday January 17, 2002 @02:27PM (#2856623) Homepage
    ...it just might be able to take the Slashdotting!
  • Where else can you go from 3500 to 10 when your radiator falls off.

    What is that, like 30 G's?

  • Uh oh... (Score:3, Funny)

    by CrazyBrett ( 233858 ) on Thursday January 17, 2002 @02:28PM (#2856635)
    AMD had better come out with a new "Athlon XXXP 3500+" to stay competitive! :)
  • Just out of curiosity, how much power does one of these 2GHz+ chips use? Combine that chip with the graphics card, the DDR SDRAM, the fans, the perhiperals... those electric meters must spin mighty fast:)
  • Sure, it's great to take the latest and greatest chips out there and boost the heck out of 'em. But what I want to see are some overclocks of things from a while back. Let's see about pumping some juice through a Pentium 100, or even a 6502C in a Commodore 64. Let's REALLY get impatient for actual powerful, stable chips, and take some PowerPC chips to the tank o' coolant.

    You also never see anyone talking about overclocking non-x86 architectures. I'd assume this is due to a lack of BIOS with that kind of speed support, and motherboards without jumpers for clock speeds. But why let that stop us, right?

    *insert sarcasm drip here, 50ml hourly*
    • Sure it's neat to see how cold and therefore fast you can make the latest chip run... for a whole couple minutes (until you run out of liquid gas coolant). What I find more interesting, are innovative solutions to cooling CPU's that are practical, stable and last more than one game of Quake.

    • Re:Neat, now how about my box...? (Score:5, Informative)

      by hattig ( 47930 ) on Thursday January 17, 2002 @02:36PM (#2856743) Journal
      You can overclock the G4's in the Power Macs if you know how. The multiplier is encoded by some resistors near the CPU on the CPU card, and if you know the layout, you can overclock your 800MHz G4 reliably to 933MHz or even 1GHz. I don't know if you can do the same with the new iMac2, I reckon there is a good chance of it once someone finds out where these resistors are on the motherboard.

      Amigans have been overclocking their 68k series processors for years. Witness the 28MHz 68000 for the A500, or the 75MHz 68060s (instead of 50MHz), a 50% overclock easy when decent coolers are added to the equation.

      It is harder to overclock the 8-bits, as the rest of the system messes up in many cases, and the video output and audio go haywire. But it has been done (Enterprise 64 in one example, upping the 5MHz Z80 by a MHz or two, or replacing it with ones that do 10's of MHz I believe. Dunno about the C64 or Atari 8-bits though.

      • Re:Neat, now how about my box...? (Score:5, Informative)

        by larien ( 5608 ) on Thursday January 17, 2002 @03:32PM (#2857213) Homepage Journal
        Of course, the problem with overclocking something like a speccy or C64 is that you're likely to speed up the gameplay of anything you're running! These systems didn't have the same kind of clock as modern PCs so timing was handled by running NOPs (or whatever). Instead of increased frame rates (or possibly as well as), you have a game running twice the speed! Sometimes you might want that, but you probably don't.

        As an aside, I bought a game ages ago that must have been written for a 386/486 and ran it on my P233 (as it was at the time). The game was unplayable because of the speed. I dread to think how it would run on my Athlon 1800+XP... *shudder*

        • I distinctly remember having the "too fast" problem with games. My all-time favorite game was Demon Stalkers. It had 16 colors! I think it was written for the 25 mhz 386s (or something like that) at the time. I remember trying to play it on my dad's computer, which must have been a 33 mhz, and it was too fast to be playable. Luckily, that computer had a "turbo" button you could push to reduce the speed or something. (How the heck did that work?!)

          Anyway, due to hard coded timing, it won't even run on my P-III, P-IIs, Celerons... even my slowest Pentium is way too fast for this game. One of these days, I'll find some old 386 for sale on eBay or somewhere, and that baby is mine, dude!

        • As an aside, I bought a game ages ago that must have been written for a 386/486 and ran it on my P233 (as it was at the time). The game was unplayable because of the speed.

          That's what the "Turbo" button on the front of your case is for.

          You do have a Turbo button, right...

          --
          Evan "What else has disappeared from PCs that I never noticed?" E.

        • Of course, the problem with overclocking something like a speccy or C64 is that you're likely to speed up the gameplay of anything you're running!

          The best game this ever happened to was Wipeout 2097-- I think it came out in 1996 or something so they should really have known better, but when playing it on my Celeron 400 with a Voodoo 3 graphics card, it went at about three times the normal speed which is already pretty fringging quickly, as anybody who's played it will testify :-)

        • As an aside, I bought a game ages ago that must have been written for a 386/486 and ran it on my P233 (as it was at the time). The game was unplayable because of the speed. I dread to think how it would run on my Athlon 1800+XP... *shudder*

          Ever hear of Night Mission Pinball? One of my favorite games when I was younger, but it was written for an IBM PC with an 8086 processor. You know, the old 3.whatever MHz things. Well, I came across it a few years ago while going back through old floppies, and after locating a 5-1/4" floppy drive, booted it on my 200MHz Pentium.

          Let's just say that the "ball launch" button turned into the "ball drain" button...

      • The Powerbooks work this way too, except that the resistors involved are smd type instead of the easier to fiddle with ones on the desktop. In fact, on the desktops, you can clock them with a Circuit Works pen and an X-Acto, if you'd prefer not to solder. I've been running my 1st generation iBook (300MHz) at 400MHz for almost 2 years now, and it has worked well since the day I 'clocked it. (processor temp went up an average of only 6F, which is good, since the iBook also doesn't have a fan). The chart reviewing the various combinations of processor speeds and ratios available on the iBooks and Powerbooks is available at The Mystic Room [bekkoame.ne.jp], if you're curious. (or just want to see a 666MHz iBook in the Apple System Profiler, if only for a sec.)

        :jeffb Apple Certified Tech

    • I've seen a few sites here and there about overclocking non-x86 architechtures. To overclock one of the other architechtures is much more difficult, usually involving desoldering the clock chip. Also, most of the overclocking involves CPUs of a few generations prior; you don't overclock that brand new, $10,000 ultrasparc-III, unless you are clinically insane.

      One of the few sites I've found where the guy has been insane enough to try overclocking a non PC is obsolyte.org [obsolyte.org]. Even then, he overclocked a fairly old sun from back when they used 68k processors.

      Although as a semi-related topic, you also don't see people talking about case mods on their non-PC systems. Am I the only one out there crazy enough to mod a case for a sun? Please tell me someone else has done it.

      • Hey, now that's a pretty cool thought. This nice little Sparc Classic I just got up and running a couple weeks ago... Hmmm... A little neon, a window... One of those biohazard stickers, maybe a marble paint job. Oh yeah, baby. A SMOKIN' 50Mhz Sparc.

        I sense a new website coming, someday... somewhere.
    • The Mac IIsi, a 20mhz 68030 machine internally looked very similar to the Mac IIci 25 mhz machine. People got around to just soldering in a new socket to swap in a new clock chip.

      I broke open my $1800 mac, trusting my non-existant soldering skills and did it, and a $20 upgrade for 25% extra performance was really something. I could almost run Marathon on it :>)

      I sneer at the BIOS OCers, if it doesn't require solder then I don't want it :>)

    • Not only can you overclock PowerPCs, but when G3 upgrade cards came out for older PowerMacs, some (notably PowerLogix) had thumbwheels on them to control bus speed/multiplier settings. No yanking of boards, no dropping jumpers into the dark recesses of the case. Shutdown, rotate the dials, startup.

      Overclocking for the rest of us.

      -matt

    • I remember overclocking an extra 486 box I had lying around so that it would play doom at a decent rate.

      But I didn't overclock the processor - I overclocked the ISA bus!

      The standard speed for an ISA bus is about 8 MHz, but my motherboard had jumpers for running it at different speeds. I had that baby running at 20MHz, and was lucky enough to find an ISA video card and network card that could run at that speed!

      It really helped bump up the FPS when playing doom. <g>

    • Reminds me of an OLD joke:

      How do you accelerate a Mac?
      9.81 m/s^2

    • PowerPC overclocking (Score:2, Informative)

      by Paladeen ( 8688 )
      You can actually overclock quite a lot of Mac systems, way back to the 68k's.

      F.e. you can OC the original iMacs (don't know about the new ones, but I had one running on 300Mhz, up from 233), the G4 Sawtooths and quite a bit of the older machines and clones.

      However, this often requires soldering on or removing transistors on the motherboard, as is the case with todays G4s.

      One notable exception to this are the PowerMacs based on the Yosemite motherboard (Blue & White G3 and the Yikes! PowerMac G4, which had a modified Yosemite). They have transistors on the motherboard and its remarkably easy to change the bus speed and clock speed.

      For a good source on Mac overclocking, check out www.xlr8yourmac.com [xlr8yourmac.com].
    • Greg Douglas at www.reputable.com managed to get 240mhz [google.com] out of an old sgi indy r5k 200, and someone (can't find article) got 300+ out of an indigo II r4400 (orig 200 or 250 mhz). However, both required cheating- replacing clock oscillators, soldering faster memory into the L2 cache spots, etc. It's a bit more involved than just changing a jumper and pouring liquid nitrogen over it...

      neh
    • I o/c'ed the 65816 in my Apple IIgs to 20mhz way way back in the day. (It started at 2.7)
    • I want to see are some overclocks of things from a while back.

      I bet that with liquid Nitrogen cooling you could crank an ENIAC up to around 5-600 FLOPS!

      -
  • Great, now I can tell the IRS that I owe them money 1 nanosecond faster....

    Seriously, is this news? 10 years from now we'll be hearing... Pentium 8 20GHz chip overclocked to 20.34Ghz!!!

    I'm just looking forward to the future when Aliens will no longer have to depend on pentium technology for fun...

  • Looks simple (Score:2, Insightful)

    by GigsVT ( 208848 )
    It looks like you just pour the nitrogen into that big metal bucket that sits on the processor. This is more of a novelty than a usable system, I'd bet the nitrogen boils off in less than an hour.

    Still, pretty amazing.

  • whoopie (Score:3, Interesting)

    by hattig ( 47930 ) on Thursday January 17, 2002 @02:31PM (#2856680) Journal
    So, this is probably how Intel demo'ed their 3.5GHz P4 last year. Shows how pointless the whole thing is, to be honest.

    A 3.5GHz P4 probably would perform like a 2.5GHz Athlon, given the difference in IPC. However, factor in SMT (HyperThreading) into the equation and it gets a lot more interesting. Hammer will have some competition when it comes out, even with a PR rating of 3400+ - the P4 will probably get to 3GHz by the end of this year.

    In the end, the consumer is the one to win. But remember, speed in a processor is only good if the rest of the system can keep up with it. Witness i845 (the SDRAM version) as a way of making a fast P4 perform even worse than before.

    I am more interested in the upcoming GeForce 4 and R300 chips myself as a way to increase gaming performance - processor power is secondary, as long as it is sufficient. For rendering performance however, I am interested in fast processors, and it looks likely that SMT P4's will rock with Lightwave 7b on a quad CPU board (8 virtual processors!). Not that I could afford one of these anyway, so the point is moot.

    • Re:whoopie (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Enrico Pulatzo ( 536675 ) on Thursday January 17, 2002 @02:54PM (#2856922)
      Can you really say that its the consumer who will win when no consumer programs require much processing power over a P2 400 or so?

      I mean, it's nice that intel and AMD can make such fast processors, but where's the bottleneck on overall performance nowadays? I'm willing to bet it's not in the chip.

      I think we've reached a point in personal computing where the software is years behind the hardware. Only in the fields of gaming or professional rendering do we need such high performance machines.

      My friend's parents recently purchased a 1.5 Ghz Pentium 4 for day to day bookkeeping!
    • So, this is probably how Intel demo'ed their 3.5GHz P4 last year. Shows how pointless the whole thing is, to be honest.

      No: the 3.5GHz P4 Intel demoed at IDF last fall was air-cooled. On the other hand, it was certainly hand-picked from a special run of chips on a boutique process tuned to produce a few very high clocking chips at the expense of overall yield. Which, yes, shows how pointless the whole thing is, to be honest.

      On the other hand, the fact that they are showing it off is an indication of where they're going. Intel showed of an (air-cooled) 2 GHz P4 at IDF fall '00, and launched the same part, not coincidentally, exactly at IDF fall '01. They showed a 3.5 GHz P4 at IDF fall '01, which means...?

      No, they probably won't get one out quite so early (3.0 is more like it), but it'll be here around the end of the year. Incidentally, the top speed of an air-cooled hand-picked chip on a special process is probably more relevant to future clock scaling than that of a Liquid Nitrogen cooled off-the-shelf part, for the simple reason that the process will be tweaked to be more aggressive as time goes on, but the temperature is never going to magically drop to -196 deg C. (And yes, the difference matters, as lower temperatures attack different limiting factors for clock rates than tweaked processes do.)

  • Those crazy Finns (Score:5, Informative)

    by milkmandan9 ( 190569 ) on Thursday January 17, 2002 @02:32PM (#2856688)
    Are at it too.

    Here [muropaketti.com] you can see they've got it to boot at 3.674GHz. The page is in Finnish (I assume), but there's some English text at the bottom too.

    • Re:Those crazy Finns (Score:4, Interesting)

      by staili ( 200478 ) <ville.vataja@gmail.com> on Thursday January 17, 2002 @02:37PM (#2856758)
      Damn, you were faster. :)
      Here's that english summary from muropaketti [muropaketti.com]:

      English summary!

      Today we cooled the new Intel Northwood 2,2GHz CPU with liquid nitrogen (LN2 -196C).

      The motherboard used in the tests was Asus P4B266 based on the Intel 845 chipset (DDR). There was a voltage modification on the motherboard which allowed the VCore to be raised as high as we needed. The memory module was Crucial PC2100 128MB and memory settings were the fastest possible (CAS 2 2-2-5).

      We used a copper bowl on top of the CPU and poured some LN2 into it. It took a while until the CPU temperature started to drop and when it was cold enough, we started the test.

      First test was run at 3300MHz (FSB 150MHz) and with no problem at all (VCore 1,9V). The next step was rather high but after raising Vcore to 2,05V Northwood worked stable at 3520MHz (FSB 160MHz). We went on with the tests and finally hit the limit.

      We were able to boot to Windows 2000 when the CPU clock frequency was 3675MHz (FSB 167MHz) but we couldn't run any benchmark programs. The highest STABLE CPU clock frequency we were able to reach was 3630MHz (FSB 165MHz). At 3650MHz we were able to run heavy benchmark programs such as SuperPi and Pifast successfully although the VCore was quite high (2,12V). It seems that Pentium 4 can handle it without any conflicts.

      Check out the pictures above

      I think the 3675MHz Wcpuid-shot we were able to get can be considered as the overclocking world record at this moment (17/01/2002), but I'm pretty sure the Japanese will try to beat it as soon as possible :-)

      BTW, Quake 3 Arena was quite fun to play when the CPU was running at 3500MHz! o_O
  • Some components of the P4 core operate at double speed (i.e. in a 2.2GHz processor they would operate at 4.4GHz). It's very difficult to believe (at least for me) that those components could work at 7GHz (2*3.5)

    The Raven.

  • link to the most important part (Score:3, Informative)

    by carlcmc ( 322350 ) on Thursday January 17, 2002 @02:32PM (#2856694)
    the picture [lib.net] of the results that ISNT IN JAPANESE.

  • Old news (Score:2, Redundant)

    by staili ( 200478 )
    And one finnish hw-site [muropaketti.com] has already overclocked 2.2Ghz to 3.675GHz

  • i'm curious.... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Hadlock ( 143607 )
    the processor can only dissapate so much heat through the silicon/whatever and the heat sink. it seems that that is the weakest link, is the connection between the core and the sink itself. would the processor run cooler w/o the heatsink (as it is disapating heat into the liq nitrogen too, that is in turn cooling the core), or does it really need a heatsink at such absurdly low temps? i understand the need for higher surface area to heat ratio concept, but it seems like with temps as low as -250* F or so, that one wouldn't need that 2" square tubing of copper as a heatsink: just stir the liq nitrogen really well :)

    as a side note, that site is entirely in japanese. when is babelfish gonna support japanese? all i got out of that was a picture of the boot screen saying 2250 that was undelined in red. i'd mirror it, but i don't see what you would get out of looking at a bunch of pictures that don't seem to support their claim.

  • I've supercooled my Dreamcast (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Now it runs faster than an X-Box.

    Much like this article, you'll just have to take my word for it.

    Also, I'm running Linux on my Nokia cellphone. I'll try to post some pictures when I can get my NetBSD digital camera to boot.

  • Only 3.5GHz? (Score:2, Redundant)

    by repvik ( 96666 )
    And this happens 15 minutes after I submitted my story on the Intel Northwood 2,2GHz overclocked to 3675MHz.

    http://www.muropaketti.com/artikkelit/cpu/northw oo d2200/ln2/index.phtml

  • Is 3.5 GHz enough? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by 4of12 ( 97621 ) on Thursday January 17, 2002 @02:36PM (#2856744) Homepage Journal

    I've got a plot showing SPECint2000 vs SPECfp2000 for eight different chips, including the Pentium 4 2.0 GHz.

    From the looks of it, overclocking to 3.5 GHz might make the Pentium 4 almost equal in performance to the IBM Power4 running at 1.3 GHz.

    • If the entire use of a processor was crunching SpecInt tests...

      • Re:Is 3.5 GHz enough? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by SirSlud ( 67381 )
        More like, if all the software available on the x86 platform didn't depend on the chipset extentions rather than the raw architechture.

        Don't confuse 'real life performance' with 'optimized for SSE/3DNOW/MMX' yadda yadda. Unfortuanetly, even though chips may be raw number crunching daemons (and Photoshop optimized for the G4 absolutely screams (maybe 33% better) over a faster clocked P4 in my first hand experience), and even though people may know that Mgz != speed, I think too many people still fail to remember that much of the percieved 'power' of certain chips come from compiler optmizations for that specific chip, not a lack of power in its competitors or an inability to turn FP and Int performance into 'real world' performance.

  • That's nothing... (Score:5, Funny)

    by brogdon ( 65526 ) on Thursday January 17, 2002 @02:38PM (#2856760) Homepage
    If I put my Athlon in the microwave, I can get numbers out of it that don't exist in nature.



  • Well, if you're factoring large primes it is, but for 99.99% of us it's a non-issue. After all, when was the last time you heard someone talk about spreadsheet recalculation times?
    • Isn't 3.5GHz the minimum speed requirement for the latest Everquest expansion?
      That and a spare 2 GB of RAM.
    • /me raises his hand. Last year I would have agreed with you, however. When you start getting into spreadsheets with over 11,000 rows and a dozen or so fields in each row and the need to analyze all that data, one starts to appreciate having something faster than a Pentium I 200.
      • But the newer processors, 800MHz and faster, are what I'm talking about. Modern systems are I/O bound, and likely to remain that way. Do I care if it takes 29 seconds to recompile vs 30 seconds?

        • Do I care if it takes 29 seconds to recompile vs 30 seconds?

          You do if you're holding a lungful of air in the total vacuum of space.

          • What, you think the heart of gold's improbability drive actually bothers with recompiles? it turns missles into potted geraniums and sperm whales, for g-d's sake.

            It'll pluck you out of space by 30th second no matter what.

    • Re:Speed is no longer important (Score:5, Funny)

      by Lionel Hutts ( 65507 ) on Thursday January 17, 2002 @02:58PM (#2856958) Journal
      Son, do we need to remind you exactly how little power one needs to factor primes?

      • oops (Score:2)

        by wiredog ( 43288 )
        I meant "find prime factors". And I was a math major, too. Hope Prof. Heath isn't reading this thread.
    • You wouldn't believe how slow those spreadsheets can get when they get large enough. It's almost to the point where I think I might upgrade my IIe.
    • Civ III is an absolute dog on my Athlon 800, which just 18 months ago was so incredibly fast.

      Civ CTP is insane on my PC, just amazing speed. Age of Empires runs 1280*1024 with 1000 pieces on the board (five empires with 200 player max) I think this also is insane. AOE was the reason I bought the Athlon. :-)

      But Civ III, alas, is slow as shit in winter. 800 MHz (with 512MB RAM and a 32MB TNT2 and IBM disks) isn't fast enough anymore.

      So, speed is still important.

  • I'm amazed (Score:4, Informative)

    by k98sven ( 324383 ) on Thursday January 17, 2002 @02:46PM (#2856854) Journal
    That the thing still functions at 77 Kelvin.
    Incredible that the motherboard doesn't break, at that low
    temperature, the resin should undergo a phase transition and become very, very brittle.

    (Some notes for all those D.I.Y.ers out there:
    Liquid nitrogen is cheaper than milk.
    Short-circuits can't occur, N2 doesn't conduct.)

    Although why he used nitrogen and not dry ice, which is cheaper, easier to handle, and probably
    better for these purposes, beats me.
    • Liquid nitrogen has a bigger neato factor. Although having dry ice smoke coming out of your PC would be pretty neat.

  • slow mobo (Score:2, Insightful)

    by cweber ( 34166 )
    You can overclock all you want, but to have an all around fast system you need the appropriate data channels to feed data to this smoking hot CPU. Although bus standards and real, available PC motherboards have gotten a lot better in the past few years, a PC still tends to slow down terribly when given a huge data load to crunch on.

    Personally, I still prefer purpose-built well balanced Unix workstations, despite their higher price tag. But then, I am a scientist and not a gamer.

  • Compare it to an Athlon (Score:3, Interesting)

    by scott1853 ( 194884 ) on Thursday January 17, 2002 @02:49PM (#2856889)
    I got a P4 1.4GHz at work a few weeks ago. I have a Athlon 800MHz at home. The RC5 client from distributed.net runs at 2.9 Mkeys/s on my home system. My machine at work only runs the client at a whopping 2.4 MKeys. So based on my result, a 3.5GHz P4 would be like a 1.8GHz Athlon.

    Flaming/joking aside - anybody know why the RC5 client does so poorly on a P4 compared to a much slower Athlon?
    • Do you want to konw why P4 is slower than Athlon? Probably one of the main reason is not the subsystem in your case, since RC5 only utilizes your CPU, P4 has a longer pipeline than your Athlon, making the CPU doing less calculation per clock.

      Long Pipeline does have an advantage however, longer the pipeline usually mean higher Mhz.
      • The P4 also has a less advanced FPU. When it comes to RC5 I guess there aren't as many clever little tricks you can use (like SSE), as the case is in 3d-graphics, so Athlon wins on brute force since it has a much better FPU.
    • And my 450 mhz G4 cube does about 4 MKeys, so a 3.5GHz P4 is like a 650mhz G4, or much slower than the new iMacs. ouch.

      lies, damn lies, etc.
    • P4 lacks a certain shift instruction in hardware, it's emulated, and it's the biggest part of the rc5 algorithm.

  • Who needs nitrogen? (Score:5, Funny)

    by GeekLife.com ( 84577 ) on Thursday January 17, 2002 @02:52PM (#2856908) Homepage
    homemade nitrogen cooling system overclocked a P4 from 2.2Ghz to an incredible 3.5ghz.

    Quick tip on "overclocking" from Ghz (Gigahertz) to ghz (gravity hertz): Throw your machine out the window. To get to decent speeds, you'll want to be at least on the 4th floor or above.

    (Alternate tip: to perceptively increase GHz, throw the Windows out of your machine)
  • Speaking as someone who does digital design: I would *never* overclock a chip on a system that I wanted to be reliable unless I knew that the manufacturer was deliberately marketing their chips at a lower speed than they were capable of. There are just too many ways that this can bite you.

    The main problem is that you just don't know when you have gone over the line. Overclocking might be suitable in most cases except that one critical path which doesn't get executed very much.

    That being said, for getting the latest gaming system, overclock to your heart's content. Who cares if the game crashes once in a while?
  • It'd be nice to run the web server on that 3.5 Ghz, but without more bandwidth, you're still slashdotted...
  • My Japanese is a little.. well, ok, I don't know any but I gather from this picture [lib.net] and this picture [lib.net] that 3 Ghz isn't all that hard to do. Apparently an array of copper heatsinks and a few extra fans can squeeze that extra speed without the use of nitro. This looks like a much more efficient way to cook an omelette than the posted nitro method.

  • Be Careful! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Kozz ( 7764 ) on Thursday January 17, 2002 @03:41PM (#2857283)
    I think these guys are getting dangerously close to cause irreparable harm to the universe as discussed here. [bbspot.com]

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday January 17, 2002 @03:55PM (#2857391)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Nice experiment. Very nerdy.

    So where does one obtain LN2 for experimentation?

    • Try your local welding gas store.

      IIRC, LN2 is a byproduct of Liquid Oxygen production. It's a happy coincidence, so it's relatively cheap.

      The refridgerators to make it aren't, though. So you end up pouring a constant stream of it into your system, and being plugged into their 'scheduled delivery' system worse than a crack addict.

      That's when it gets expensive.

      • "Oh, you don't want your precious computer to melt? I've got just the thing! Now... what are you going to do for me...?"

      Just kidding... they're not quite that bad. Close, though.

  • That's great... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Bunkryrass ( 214937 )
    ... now how about some faster hard drives? Seriously I sit in front of my P4 1.7, and my T-Bird 800, which both have extremely fast hardware, but I wait for the hard drive to load large graphics, save files, etc... When do we get 10,000 RPM Hard drives? What happened to Serial IDE? Wasn't that supposed to be the next big thing? A hard drive spinning at 7200 RPM, and transfer rates of 100 MB/s really are a huge bottleneck now. And don't say we don't need anything faster than that, I'm pretty sure we don't need anything faster than 2GHz for our home computers either... I don't have enough money for Fibre Channel... would be nice though.

  • LH? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by caveat ( 26803 )
    i've played a little bit with cryogenics in Phys Chem lab, and while LN2 rocks, liquid helium is an order of magnitude colder (4K vs. 77K, also $14.99 a liter, $0.89/L for LN2)...begging the question, what would happen if you used liquid helium to cool your system? iirc, silicon is a superconductor at 4K. would the superconductivity short out the chip (by making the substrate conductive), or would you be able to crank it up to any speed you want, say a few THz? (/no/ resistance = /no/ heat) it'd be a real bitch to manage, and you'd have to sink your whole motherboard in the very-well-insulated LH (but then eveything would be @ 4K and superconducting...hmm...1GHz FSB?), but could it work?

    just a little food for thought.

    • I don't think pure silicon superconducts at all since it is a natural insulator, meaning no electron flow. There are just no spare electrons to push around. However, doped silicon (hey, man, pass it around! sorry, bad joke) could become a superconducter.

      As for speed, the absolute speed limit is the speed of light, but electrons are inhibited by their mass. There is an equation for this, but I forget it right now.

      Also, at these crazy speeds, you now have to take into account the switching speeds of the transistors in the chips. They are fast, but they are limited, no matter how cold they are.

      Another side effect that most people have missed is that if you cool this chips and boards to extremely cold temps, they become very, very brittle. I'm not sure how brittle, but how funky would it be to sneeze and watch your mobo shatter?!
  • This reminds me that when the pentiums first came out that rumors were flying that those machines would need Liquid N.

    Kinda funny considering the work that is needed to get Liquid N, and the work needed to OC these chips.

    To OC my classic Athlon I need to do a lot of work... not worth it considering it's more than enough speed.

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