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Pushing P4 to 5.25GHz with Liquid Nitrogen

Posted by michael on from the slow-down-cowboy dept.

SkywalkerOS8 writes "The folks at Tom's Hardware have an article up about their attempt to overclock a Pentium 4 over 5 GHz using liquid nitrogen as cooling. A DivX video is available along with pictures of the custom copper cooling head they made."

2 of 311 comments (clear)

  1. Hardware damage! by starsong · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Heh, this looks like a lot of fun, but that board's not going to last long. Look at the picture on the first page. See the capacitors next to the socket with little ice crystals growing on them? Those are electrolytic caps; they use a liquid electrolyte which doesn't take kindly to being frozen solid. I'm amazed they didn't split open. Colder isn't always better; some components will simply fail at liquid-N2 temperatures. At least they took steps to deal with condensation.

  2. Talk about journalistic integrity! by Hobophile · · Score: 4, Insightful
    I saw this article over lunch today, and when I checked back just now I noticed they'd removed the page of benchmarks. One of the interesting results shown was that the Athlon 64 FX-51 managed to beat this overclocked behemoth in a couple tests.

    Only one or two, mind you, but it still boggles the mind that this Pentium running 2.5x faster than the Athlon chip didn't utterly dominate all comers.

    Given the history of THG and their decidedly negative (some might say Intel-funded) view of the Athlon 64 chips, it's not particularly surprising they'd choose to pull that page, but it does cast further doubt on the continued relevance of what was once a high-quality tech reporting site.

    The few posts questioning this on the THG forums seem to have disappeared in the time it took me to write this. Strange...