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.

Comments

Just the CPU, or..

[dr.Flake]

At this point they are only extreme cooling the CPU. Some of the "coolness" will also cool the MB a bit.

At what point will it be "necessary" to dip the total package of MB, memory, GPU and CPU in the nitrogen?

I mean, you would want to increase FSB and memory timings as well if you want to get half-decent Quake3 fps's scores.

Re:Just the CPU, or..

[Sampsa]

Here is a picture of LN2-cooled GeForce 4 Ti4600 display adapter:

GeForce 4 GPU running at 409MHz and Memory 777MHz

:)

What's next ???

[dr.Flake]

What would be the next step to more extreme cooling???

Like putting a vaccuum cleaner over the nitrogen to lower the surface pressure.
Any other gas around that's even cooler?

(imagine a beowolf cluster of these. (it had to be said!))

Re:What's next ???

[Hittite Creosote]

The coolest gas you could get normally would be liquid Helium, at about five degrees above absolute zero. Believe me, it's not easy to work with in the lab (and if you think waving a vacuum cleaner around is the way to reduce surface pressure, you shouldn't go anywhere near it).

Liquid Nitrogen for External Use Only

[stereoroid]

It is possible to hold some on your tongue and blow "smoke rings", but if you want to know what happens if you swallow it, you may end up in the running for a Darwin Award. This guy did it and failed to qualify (i.e. lived to tell the tale). It's in his own words, and he left out the goriest details, but it's still cringeworthy.

If you've seen this article before: yes, I know. Some people haven't. This is for them. Thanks.

Over 4GHz?

[r6144]

If someone can make 4.3GHz mode stable, I suspect some software may break for storing the Hz number in a 32-bit number, and they may say "45,336,372 Hz processor detected".

Thank god, in linux/arch/i386/time.c an unsigned long is used to measure KHz's.

Re:Over 4GHz?

[VAXman]

Actually there were problems in going above 2.2GHz since that is negative number (using 32 bit signed). See here for example.

Danger?

[Anonymous Coward]

I would think that this is best done in a well ventilated area.

A relatively small jar of liquid N2 evaporated and warmed up to room temperature in a short time can replace many liters of air by pure N2. Trying to breathe the stuff won't cause a drowning or suffocating feeling or even a smell, as the air we breathe normally contains 70% of it.
The first symptoms of suffocation by lack of O2 in the air (rather than lack of air) are some kind of euphoric feeling and wooziness, so you wouldn't necessarily start thinking of finding a way to reduce the effect.

I bet that euphoric feeling is just what they experienced when they saw it working ;-)

Underclocking, anyone? SpeedStep?

[Florian]

Any chance to underclock this beast at, say, 1.4 GHz w/ passive cooling? (Would still fulfill my computing needs.)

But really, what a waste of electricity, heat, and what a noise pollution. I'm waiting for desktop CPUs with SpeedStep which clock down to 100 MHz when you're doing vi editing and go up to 2.8 GHz, turning on all fans, when you compile software or transcode video streams.

I hope there will be enough consumer demand for such CPUs, pushing AMD/Intel towards saner technology.