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."

Comments

Like trying to overclock a VW

[xC0000005]

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.

It's all giggles until someone loses consciousness

[Anonymous Coward]

"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).

I've done better than that!

[NeoThermic]

Yes, I got 6.58Ghz out of my 1.2Ghz Intel Celeron. Image1

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