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P4 2.2GHz Overclocked to 3.5GHz

Posted by CmdrTaco on 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)."

5 of 620 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Operating systems by sql*kitten · · Score: 5, Informative

    Other are just ports.

    Well, yes and no. Oracle is developed in two layers, VOS or "Virtual Operating System" abstracts all the primitives like threads, pipes, file handling etc from the underlying OS, and Oracle itself, which is written to VOS APIs. So the core Oracle engineering team code for pure functionality, and the VOS teams keep their APIs in sync with each other on different platforms. If Oracle want to target a new OS or platform, they simply develop a VOS for it.

    I believe the Oracle engineers work on Suns, but they are targetting VOS, not Solaris directly.

    That's why you have to start the service before you can start the instance on NT. Win32 is sufficiently different from Unix-like systems to need an environment in place before starting Oracle, whereas Unix-like systems can just link the VOS into the main binary. It needs to work like this because Oracle is Oracle, on any platform, once you log into SQL*Plus, it's exactly the same. Oracle is more complex than many operating systems, it provides its own scheduling, resource quotas (storage and CPU), IPC mechanisms (AQ, DBMS_PIPE, DBMS_ALERT, etc), programming languages (PL/SQL and Java) and a whole lot more. It is a platform in its own right.

  2. Those crazy Finns by milkmandan9 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Are at it too.

    Here 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.

  3. Re:Neat, now how about my box...? by hattig · · Score: 5, Informative
    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.

  4. I'm amazed by k98sven · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  5. Re:Neat, now how about my box...? by larien · · Score: 5, Informative
    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*