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More Super Cool Overclocking
octools.com has a followup to a story we linked there a couple of months ago where they submerged a motherboard in nitrogen cooled flourinet, and overclocked the hell out of the chips. Well, they're back with an extensive photo documentary of
the sequel where they try to take it below zero, and clock things over a gigahertz. You probably shouldn't be trying this at home, but it sure is fun to see on a Web page.
Yeah, Samba and the penguin logo, that pretty much accounts for everything. :)
-David
The fact remains that the cpu's that most overclockers use are very cheap in comparison with the latest high end chips. For a few extra dollars spent on a good motherboard and a Golden Orb cooler overclockers are safely pushing 600 MHz Celerons to 850 Mhz and beyond. With this sort of price for performance, one might ask, "Why wouldn't you overclock?"
That said, this article was obviously done just for the sheer geek of it and power to them. The advances in cooling could easily be used in future production machines.
If you have to ask "Why overclock?" then you are obviously not the type who takes every new toy in your home apart as soon as it comes in the door just to see how it works and how you can screw with it.
IANAOC. Seems they had success when everything was uniformly cooled with the Flourinert and dry ice. Problems arose when they used the Liquid Nitrogen on JUST the processor. So, the CPU could go faster than the support chips which were not similarly cooled? Maybe the video card, though now running with the same bus speed as the LN-cooled CPU could not operate at those speeds without also being cooled to LN temps. They mentioned:
CPU could handle it okay, but the rest of the system was breaking down. Gotta cool the WHOLE thing, or else your system is only as fast as your slowest link.
So, for MISSION: SUBMERSIBLE 3, I'd like to see them try immersing the ENTIRE RIG in LN, with good-sized heat sinks on the CPU, video card... everywhere and THEN see how it worked. The major concern I'd have would be they migh be encountering a race condition between components that would never arise at conventional speeds.
Offtopic, but here's an idea of what they could have done with the LN when they were done with THAT experiment. (I attended a party in college where we actually DID this. IIRC, It was some time around 1979 or 1980.) Use the excess LN to freeze some vodka in ice cube trays! The vodka will easily freeze at those temps... voila! VodCubes! Take a couple VodCubes, drop 'em in a cup of collins mixer, wait for the VodCubes to stop dancing around on the comparitively hot collins mixer, and enjoy your vodka collins! Looking back, I wish we had tried it with orange juice -- could have called it a frozen screwdriver!
Well, they thought about it more this time, let's give them a little credit. I'd say it's at least 2/3's baked. :-)
Quando Omni Flunkus Moritati
Recently, in one of my EE courses, overclocking was mentioned. It was also mentioned why certain designs can only be pushed so far, and after that they cannot be clocked any higher, regardless of how well they are cooled.
The problem is with propagation delays. Basically, when one part of a digital logic circuit goes high or low, this change takes time to propagate to the rest of the circuit. This is a very small delay, but when you have a circuit as complicated as, say a Pentium III, it can become important. There are small gaps in between parts of the circuit being in different states, and as the clock rate is pushed higher and higher, these gaps become smaller and smaller. If the clock rate is pushed too high, different states of the circuit will overlap, essentially causing it to malfunction. It should be noted that a circuit or portion thereof does not change states (0 to 1 or 1 to 0) instantaneously; this is what allows the overlap that ends overclockability. Propagation delays also explain why, for example, you can't push a C64 to 200 MHz. The circuits in the CPU weren't designed for speeds like that.
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I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
Didn't samba come from Brazil?
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
Well, I guess that time is a measure of distance and (relative?) velocity (i think??). So, if things stop moving (atomic level) like they (are supposed to) do at zero, how can you mesure time? Plus the buttons on the stop watch probably get too cold :)
I believe that their computer had actually jumped forward in time!!!
So that's why the Delorean and the flux capacitor had the fog comming off it! It was LN-cooled and over-clocked!
it's not about seeing if a chip can break the 1 Ghz barrier. Off the shelf crap can do that. It's about make stuff perform well beyond its rated capacity -- about testing the limits. It's about doing something funky for an afternoon that hasn't been done much before.
/., how many people would say "Why did he do that? There's nothing at the top of that mountain. That's dumb. He could have flown over it. What a moron."
This may be a bold comparision, but if Sir Edmond Hillary's accomplishment was posted on
It didn't work. When they tried to feed the LN2 into the block and boot, everything went wrong. "Somehow the CMOS was damaged by the extreme temperature." If you've interested to read what finally happened, go here
--
Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
Over a year ago I spent about $400 building an overclocked dual celeron system. It has two C333's running comfortably at 500mhz with no problems at all. One year later its still faster than most systems available today. Lets see you beat that price/performance factor. It sure was funny seeing intel developers stating that celerons don't support SMP while abit was cranking out BP6's left and right.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
So what happened? Did it boot? Yeah it did. Booted easily with the CPU at about -150C(block temp), but you cannot understand the language anymore. The screen suddenly turned alien into us. We cannot understand a damn thing! Checksum error was up. We could go into the BIOS but everything was different. The keyboard types different letters.
Some scientists think that as you approach Absolute Zero, time starts to slow down, just like time slows down as you approach the speed of light.
So based on the extremely low temperatures, and the extreme amounts of electricity involved. I believe that their computer had actually jumped forward in time!!! Those strange characters on the screen were really future space alien types trying to communicate! How else could you explain this line here:
The screen suddenly turned alien into us
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
If I have thick enough gloves, I should be fine.
This plan has several added benefits: I can always have supercooled Pepsi with me and if I say an extremely attractive female and start to lose control of myself, I can just dump my backpack over my head and be cooled off.
crack... crack...
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
"Okay Gordon, just put the dry ice into the case."
I think that what happened was they over-cooled the CPU to the point where it was unreliable.
See, every overclocker knows that semiconductors have a maximum temperature at which they will operate reliably. But few realize that there is also a minimum rated temperature. I don't remember the exact ranges, but mil-spec parts are rated for a much lower minimum temperature range. I seem to recall that one of the minimum ratings (probably the "regular" one) is -50C. So the dry ice/flourinert may have been the perfect mix after all, with the pour temperature of the flourinert keeping everything (except the 3-D card which they weren't overclocking anyhow) at the perfect temperature, and keeping the cool temperature snug against all the important parts.
Too bad they didn't try to see how fast they could clock it at -46C before trying the LN2. Maybe they can do that for the sequel.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
I wonder what would happen to the system when I mitakenly spill my coffee into the case...hmm...ultra fast comp and ice cream maker in one!
Not only is it amazing that these guys have got a processer to overlock to 1057MhZ at less than -43 degrees Celcius BUT they're also from New Zealand. Why is that everything's now coming from Australia and New Zealand - samba did, and Linus got his inspiration for a penguin logo for linux while in Australia
GO AUSSIES!!!!
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