Vapochilled Pentium 4 System At 3.3GHz

SpinnerBait writes "Overclocking the Personal Computer has gotten considerably more elegant over the past few years and there is now an entire industry dedicated to it. One of the latest innovations is super cooling processors down to sub zero temperatures with standard vapor phase refrigeration, in an effort to allow clock speeds to crank far beyond manufacturer specifications. This article takes a look at the Asetek Vapochill, a Vapor Phase Refrigerated PC Case, that chilled a 2.8GHz Pentium 4 down to -7C and allows it to run stable in a workstation environment at 3.3GHz and beyond."

Comments

Ugh

[GigsVT]

You also are instructed to fill all the pin holes in the motherboard socket with thermal grease as well.

What a mess. Just don't try this with arctic silver.

Re:More dollars than sense?

[Moridineas]

You hit it on the head. 99% of the people who are doing overclocking like this aren't doing it on professional systems or work systems. And yeah, the price / speed ratio for doing something this complex is terrible. It's just the same as people who like to deck out their cars and tweak them to within an inch of their lives, etc. It's TOTALLY a status symbol within some nerd cliques.

OTOH, some overclocking is very easy, and can add a lot of value. The first K7 chip I had, a 600MHz Duron was capable of being overclocked to ~860 MHz with the default cooler. That was good.

Reasonable enough price

[Nighttime]

Less than $500 for the kit so long as you don't need to beef up your PSU, and I believe most OC'ers will have a fairly decent one to begin with.

I remember a couple of years ago someone in the comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.chips newsgroup paid $5000 to get a Kryotech system that allowed an Athlon 7-800MHz to be overclocked to run at 1GHz. Madness!

I disagree

[Sepherus]

The general feeling is indeed that there isnt much need for faster processors.
This article, however, has nothing to do with the general computer user. Its about having the fastest available chip on the market and running it faster than everyone else. While there isnt really a practical use for this, some people enjoy it (myself included. I tend to stick more to the "budget" end of things though ;))

I could use a car analogy here, but thats been so overdone I'll spare you.

Phase - Change cooling systems such as the one used here typically only cost around $700. Thats less than twice the cost of a high end graphics card and it can be used to supercool any processors released using the same socket system. In short, its not such a huge/useless investment as you make out.

This is my first post on slashdot, so apologies for any mistakes.

~Laurence Wood

Re:More dollars than sense?

[GigsVT]

Just to say you did something a lot of other people haven't.

Installing a manufactured product that someone else built doesn't seem to be very much of a hobby to me. I guess it's a hobby if you can call something like car audio a hobby. Spending lots of money to show off seems to be the real hobby in those cases.

Waste, waste, waste

[floydigus]

This kind of balls-to-the-wall turbo-charging is not only un-necessary, it's wasteful too.
Most PC's are pretty power hungry as it is, without introducing a whole new load of cooling equipment. Although it appears to make the processor perform more efficiently, actually it makes the whole box a whole lot less efficient in terms of power consumption.
Much more encouraging is the recent trend to making silent PC's. These tend to be pretty energy efficient as well as nicer to have about the place.

Re:Is it worth it?

[SagSaw]

100*((3.3-2.8)/(2.8)) ~= 17.9% >> 2%

Old and outdated

[Analysis Paralysis]

Asetek's Vapochill system has been available since 2000, has been extensively reviewed on dozens of hardware lists (get a list here) and Asetek themselves have redone their website so that it will only work with browsers claiming to be Internet Explorer (lamers).

A better overclocking solution is the Prometia from chip.con (whose server seems to be down at the moment) which cools the processor down to -40C rather than Vapochills comparatively tame -20C. Get a list of reviews comparing them here.

C'mon Cowboy Neal, this is a waste of space.

P4's don't like supercooling for long terms...

[yokem_55]

These phase change coolers have proven themselves to be somewhat destructive to P4's in the long term though. After a couple of months of use, the chips mysteriously die. Now typically when chips die in overclocking its due to electron migration from rediculous overvolting (and this is more true with .13u chips). However several people have had thier P4's die with only nominal (~1.6 volts, most p4's defaualt to 1.5) overvolting while useing these phase change coolers. Turns out, Intel only specifies these chips for operation to temperatures down to 20 F, and what happens is the supercooling causes the chip to become so brittle, that even slight virbrations can cause damage to the chip, thus killing it.