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.

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.

Old and outdated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.