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Pushing P4 to 5.25GHz with Liquid Nitrogen
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."
I think they should have splashed some nitrogen on some of those flash ads. Gives me a headcahe just looking at the main page.
Also makes my Thinkpad screech to a crawl.
they should have pored it on good ol' Tom and then put a hammer to him to see if he'd break into little pieces.
relax im kidding.
Oh well, I bet it'll get really good time in Seti.
Treehugger? Treehugger... Treehugger!
reading things like these I'm reminded of the good old days where all you had to do was getting two 333MHz celerons, overclock them to 500MHz by upping the FSB, some socket-to-slot adaptors and *baddabing* you had a total of 1GHz for a bargain while using normals coolers. Was that only 3 or 4 years ago? *sigh*
In other news...
A rose achieved 3.7GHz and a segment of rubber hose was clocked to 7.5GHz. A red rubber ball, however was unable to surpass 300 MHz befor shattering.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The question is, how fast did it play solitaire once Windoze was booted?
<sig>no sig</sig>
I would like to see the same thing done with an Analog-to-Digital converter. It would be fun to be able to direct sample a 2.4GHz WLAN signal!
I think that's the topic of an upcoming story, be patient.
I have an Athlon that seems to be growing warts. Will this take care of that as well?
Custom copper cooling head? That's a bong if I've ever seen one.
They must have received an early beta of the new MS OS. They need more horsepower.
The point isn't to have *this* much processing power in a home computer.
It's more like climbing a mountain. You do it because you can and you enjoy doing it.
I can imagine it now, one careless motion and SMASH your CPU is in itty bitty pieces.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
This is a amusing article, but kind of misses the point. So one problem with running processors faster is that they get too hot and we can get around that by cooling it with liquid nitrogen. Cool, but CPU heat is just one design element contributing to the effective speed of the computer.
This is like saying that I should cool my VW with liquid nitrogen so that I can run the engine faster. Sure, I'll pick up some speed, but honestly there are lots of other factors preventing my VW from running at a more productive speed than how fast I can get the engine spinning. The shape (like the bus on a PC), the steering (peripherals), and mostly that the cops don't appreciate me going 328mph through the school zone.
www.voiceofthehive.com - Beekeeping and Honeybees for those who don't.
FP!
hmm, maybe i should get one of these. My processor is kinda slow...
The Braying and Neighing of Barnyard Animals Follows.
I'm not sure, but a better use of industrial gases might be this and probably would provide more perceived results.
(speaking as an ex LOX, LH2 and LN2 piping designer, of course, YMMV)
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.
Silly rabbit, NO one worth their weight in Fava beans runs an app like maya on an overclocked machine. Nasty artifacts, much more effecient to span the render of MULTIPLE proccessors
YOU SUCK BALLS!
"Wild" Bill Zollar, my Chem 140 professor told us the story about how ever couple or four years he'd do a liquid nitrogen demonstration. The common freeze it break it variety, which he personally didn't find exciting enough to suit his tastes. So he'd don two latex gloves having filled up the thumb of one with ground beef. He would then dunk the thumb of ground round into the liquid nitrogen while he was talking and then take it out and hit it with a hammer. Appearently, the last year he did it, a chuck of his flash frozen fake finger hit a girl in the head, causing her to pass out! Which in turn got HIM sent to the dean's office, and why he couldn't do it for us, and hasn't done it since.
Or so the story went (as I recall).
With all that fancy talk about tolerances and only one company in the world that could make the aparatus, you'd think it would be bit fancier... Nope, just a coper plate with a copper tube sticking up off of it that you fill with nitrogen, and it cools via evaperation. I could build it with some 2-inch copper pipe, a torch, and some soldier... 5 GHz is cool and all, but come on, is there really the need to make it sound so difficult?
with that amount of ice crystals, I'm surprised it didn't short? I know it's distilled water but you figure minerals from the metallic elements on the silicon would contaiminate it and cause shorts?
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Its a true screenshot. What isn't true is the actual clock... I ran some ASM that had a typo in it, and it somehow accelerated the windows timer, thus making apps see my CPU as something faster.
Even more amazing is what 3D mark 03 sees. Yes, to that program, I have a 60.1Ghz processor (not a typo)
Image 2
And I didn't even have to use any more cooling than the laptops normal fan.
Any Questions? ;)
NeoThermic
Use my link above, or to view my server, NeoThermic.com
although -190 Celcius is indeed somewhat on the chilly side, I think N2 would be a sound choise: You need something with a boiling point somewhere below 0 celcius (so you have a nice temperature gradient to work with) and you don't want to worry about the environment too much when your liquid boils away. N2 fits, it is easily available and has the bonus benefit that it will nicely extinguish the small fires where the graphics card is trying to keep up with the CPU
This overclocking stuff is REALLY stupid to the point of insanity. My conclusion is that it's a weird fantasy about the lone DIY (do-it-yourself) tinkerer.
First, consider the economic side. For all of the special efforts and costs needed to cool down, test, and monitor an overclocked CPU, you could just buy a couple more for the same speedup effect. No special anything required. At the same time, there is no real need for all those cycles--we have a glut of cycles now. If it were really cost-effective to overclock and use special cooling systems, then the very few people who actually do need lots and lots of cycles would be using overclocking for their supercomputers--and they don't. They just buy more CPUs and run them the way they were designed.
The design question leads to the second point. Building a modern CPU is not a hobby for amateurs. It is an incredibly complicated device involving the efforts of large teams of very clever people using very fancy design tools. No one person could even know all the details of a modern CPU. Far too many details. They may know some of the higher level features, or know a lot of detail about a tiny section, but no one really understands all of it. However, they are doing the best they can to insure that it will work reliably, and that includes MANY design considerations that are related to the clock speed.
So back to my main conclusion: Overclocking is a fantasy of the DIY tinkerer "beating" the experts. Actually, it's nice when it happens, but overclocking is NOT one of those cases. The overclockers fantacize about some form of "delivering more bang for the buck", but they are competing directly against professionals with the same goal. The pros win, especially in Intel's case where their development costs per CPU are almost negligible. As the joke goes, "The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that's the way to bet." The overclockers already lost. (By the way, I think this is also an expecially American fantasy, a kind of "independence" thing, and that there are very few non-American overclockers.)
One more technical aspect as a fairly concrete example. Overclocked computers can become unreliable. Many overclockers limit their testing to "Does it boot and seem to run the OS properly?" However, the OS is not using the floating point resources the same way that true numeric applications do. The machine may seem okay as far as the OS is concerned, but actually be producing gibberish results. (There was actually a probable example of this published by seti@home. I'm tempted to diverge into the psychological relationships there...)
Ergo, I've never heard of Intel hiring someone for their expertise in overclocking, and I don't expect to.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
But does "Tom's Hardware" sound like a gay porn site name
MoFscker
Dear Slashdot Reader:
Thank you for pointing out to us the dangers of condensation. We have taken steps to address this problem.
Instead of simply dehumidifying the air, in true Tom's Hardware Style(tm), our next overclocking attempt will take place in the vacuumn of space.
Sincerely,
Tom's Hardware
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
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...
Where are the usual pretty Tom's Hardware graphs? What the hell is a 5.25 GHz processor good for, if we can't awe over benchmarks like "time it takes to process a SETI unit" or its score in Sandra 2004?
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
It's probably something like 3M Fluorinert.
The key to the enjoyment of pop music is to replace any instance of "love" with "C.H.U.D."
Some television engineers I know mentioned that they actually used this technique for mounting electronics in remote locations that needed to stay both temperature-controlled, and absolutely dust-free.
:)
So they took refrigerators and removed all of the shelving from the interior, drilled holes through the side (around the coolant tubes) to bring in power cables, data cables and such (the holes were then filled with expanding foam to make them airtight), and plugged it in.
They said that every time they visited the site, everywhere else was dusty and dirty (and hot). Inside the fridge, it was cool (10c) and dust-free.
Cheap way of making sure that things in remote locations stay working
After watching those videos, I can't help but wonder why they were blocking out part of the screen on the CPU-ID program. What could've been so super-top-secret there?
N.
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
This is basically dumping liquid nitrogen onto processors outside and clocking them up. There's not much of an achivement there. You can soak LEDs in liquid nitrogen and make them do all sorts of interesting tricks too. Whoop.
Why not wait until someone comes up with a indoor version, properly vented and pumped, with a compressor cycle that you can actually use on a long-term basis? That would be an achivement I'd like to see. Of course, it's orders of magnitude more difficult and dangerous, too.
..don't panic
A lot of people have asked about the relevance of this: Basically, there is none. But that's all right. It's a nice story to entertain their readers, and I'm willing to bet it was a lot of fun for them, too. Not everything needs to have a point, you know.
That said, there's one thing that would still interest me: Now that we've seen them overclock that wimpy Pentium 4 (I hate that architecture! How can anyone build a 20-step pipeline?), let's have some real techno-porn: Liquid Nitrogen-cooled 2x2.0GHz G5 Powermac! That would be quite a sight to behold. Especially with that nifty 1Ghz FSB.
Divide et impera!
You must never have read Tom's Hardware before. *EVERYTHING* they do is played up to man-on-the-moon levels, regardless of how trivial. You can either get used to it, or do like me and simply avoid Tom's as much as possible. :)
I overclocked for two years on Ritalin.
Pull my finger for my public key.
Good one. The only other professor grosses-out students tale I know of is licking pee from a finger.
Liquid Nitrogen is cold when it's evaporating. You want it to be cold? Give it a flat surface to evaporate on, and keep pouring on the Nitrogen.
Basically, if you lay a piece of Saran Wrap on your motherboard, then let the LN2 drip on the CPU constantly, you can cool that bastard to -195.798C.
Making a big, tall tower just looks like a stupid Freudian mistake.
Sorry Germans. No wonder they've lost every war they ever started.
I wonder if you can attach quad monitors, quad mice and keyboards, and have a lanparty on once CPU. I know the radeon 9800 can go that far and already does miltiple monitors, I know of X projects to use multiple USB mice simultaneously and possibly multiple USB keyboards too.
hmmmmmmmmmm`
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Hmm. Safety gloves? Protective glasses?
You can definitely tell that these are computer geeks, and not chemistry geeks. Liquid nitrogen is remarkably safe stuff to play with, unless you're deeply stupid about it.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Of course it's not a good idea! Geez, did you look at the pictures? The voltage regulators were covered in ice after a half hour or so. PCs are NOT designed for these sorts of systems, it's unlikely that it would run for a day, let alone any significant amount of time.
Besides which the cost to buy all that equipment, get a customized motherboard, have someone mill the heatsink and attachments, etc. etc. would surely make this this a ridiculously expensive system.
However, when it comes right down to it, it sure does get the website a lot of hits, and that was the goal all along.
Why do people soup up their Honda Civic with mods instead of buying a better car?
;)
Why do people buy Acura with leather seats and high-end mods instead of buying a better BMW for the same price?
Why do people install super cool alarm systems in their cars when you can buy cheaper insurance to cover the same thing?
If you don't know the answer, you never will
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
Just an FYI, the boys in Japan have had a 5+ghz stable p4 since March.
http://son.t-next.com/
THG likes to say they do everything first, when in fact their p4 wasn't even stable at 5ghz. only 4.7ghz.
And yes. It is excessive.
-Zoson
From the article: > In plain English: 84 watts on a surface of 1.12 > square centimeters - the size of a fingertip! > Extrapolated to square meters that make 840,000 > watts or 840 kW. Not exactly true. The true number is 10000 / 1.12 * 84 = 750 KW
Have you even read the benchmarks THG between the P4 and the Athlon XP 64/64 FX they did after it was released? They show how well the Athlon 64 chips do against the higher-clocked P4's, and consistenly recommend AMD's as more bang for your buck.
Are you talking about this article?: AMD's Athlon 64 Has Arrived: the Athlon 64 FX and Athlon 64 (and Intel's P4 Extreme) Reviewed
First, there's no mention of "more bang for your buck" in said article.
And while they do "show how well the Athlon 64 chips do against the higher-clocked P4's", they summarize it as such:
"Summary: The P4 3.2 EE wins 32 times, the Athlon 64 FX-51 15 times - an uncertain 64-bit future for AMD"
It reads like they're heralding AMD's demise!