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Overclockers Top 6GHz With A 3.6GHz-Rated P4

Posted by timothy on from the ambitious dept.

sH4RD writes "The 6GHz barrier has been broken by two guys, a little LN2 (liquid nitrogen for those not as chemistry inclined), and an Intel Pentium 4 (Prescott) 3.60GHz. Check out some icing and some proof of speed. Better yet take a look at how fast it calculates pi. Also be sure to check out the original announcement."

4 of 421 comments (clear)

  1. Erm... by __aavhli5779 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I sure hope they were using Gentoo, because if not they couldn't take advantage of those incredible speeds with some hot -O3 -funroll-loops action :P

    In all seriousness, this is pretty amazing, but I can't really see the usefulness. For sheer geek pride, sure, why not? But as far as I can tell the expense involved outweighs any gain in performance; for probably half of what these poor folks spent getting a P4 to run stably at 6 ghz (and it doesn't even sound super-stable from what I've read) they could've probably bought a couple more CPUs and had a proper SMP system instead. Regardless, I admire their tenacity and mourn for the warranty on their poor CPU :P

    1. Re:Erm... by bizpile · · Score: 5, Insightful

      But as far as I can tell the expense involved outweighs any gain in performance;

      Isn't that what being a geek is all about? It's a "becuase it's there"-type of thing.

  2. Tops 6ghz? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    So it tops 6 GHz, but they only calculate pi at 5.4 GHz? Sounds like the only thing it can run at 6 GHz without crashing is CPU-Z...

  3. Re:This is the type of thing..... by RzUpAnmsCwrds · · Score: 4, Insightful

    MHz *does* matter. A 3GHz Opteron should be 2x as fast as a 1.5GHz Opteron (of course, that doesn't take into account the rest of the system - memory bandwidth, disk bandwidth, etc.)

    The "MHz Myth" referrs to the fact that MHz is a poor metric to compare CPUs with. It's fair to compare a 3.2GHz P4 Prescott to a 3.6GHz P4 Prescott and expect that the 3.6GHz chip will be faster. What doesn't make sense is to comare a 3GHz P4 to a 2.4GHz Opteron and claim that the P4 is faster.