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P4 2.80GHz Overclocked to 3.917GHz
vwbus writes "The guys at Muropaketti have taken a brand new Pentium 4 2.80GHz chip, bought a pint or so of liquid nitrogen and overclocked it to an astounding 3.917GHz. The Finns describe how they put together the system on their web page, and luckily there are a whole set of pictures which demonstrate exactly what they've done, so you don't need to understand Finnish to figure it out. The pictures show wisps of nitrogen evaporating from the jar sitting on top of the CPU, and they publish some SiSoft figures to demonstrate the kind of speeds they attained."
The folks at Muropaketti have had a lot of practice with this cooling method.
If you have to ask the question "why do these guys try to push the boundaries?", then you are in the wrong place. I can't speak for all techies, but all the ones I know are always interested in seeing how far you can push the envelope. Think of it like art.
You know, I was just thinking about this the other day, for some reason.
I first read the story years ago on USENET (it might even have been when I was still in school, so late 80's early 90's). I remember that he even mentioned in his posting that "this is not an urban legend, so if it ever turns into one, you'll know it started with fact. Expect to see a journal article soon."
It looked a lot like the story at the darwin awards, but for the lack of mention of urban legends (of course, if I really *did* read it 12 years ago, then I may be having a memory lapse).
That said, the story looks more and more like a joke. I did a quick google USENET search, and didn't find the original article, but found plenty of reprints, mostly in joke groups. There's no mention of time (where and when did this happen?). And you'd certainly think that it would have made it to the journals by now.
So, has anyone found any definitive research on this story? I'd believed it was true, when I first read it, then forgot about it for years. Now, I'm not so sure. And snopes doesn't have anything on it.
Any chance to underclock this beast at, say, 1.4 GHz w/ passive cooling?
:( ). It's occurred to me that 350MHz is probably too much for a firewall (plus, I need a box for experimentation), so I set out to try and build a simple, low-profile, low-speed box for a firewall.
I've been thinking about that a lot lately, myself. I'm trying to rebuild my network at home (now that I have a cable modem, but don't start me on that!
Can't be done. Everywhere I look, I see 1GHz+ systems. I could find 500 MHz K6 CPUs, but that was about the lowest. And anything on eBay is both too fast and too big. I want something simple and small, that I can maybe put a four-port ethernet card into. Something like a 1U PIX, but running BSD.
This becomes more of an issue as I think about set-top boxes -- I want to be able to do video/audio/games/web to the TV, but I don't want to have whirring hard drives or whiny fans in my bedroom. Once again, I need a decent speed, but not super kick-ass (especially if I can do MPEG decoding in hardware), but, again, I'm out of luck. Stuff that slow (and cool) just isn't easy to find.
'course, I'm not looking *too* hard, either. And, no, I don't want to go the PC104 or SBC route -- if it comes to that, I'd just buy an Athlon 2600 and retire my Duron to firewall duty, for the same cost.