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Pentium 4 631 Overclocked to 8 GHz

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the smokin dept.

Andreas writes "There are always those who are willing to take things one step further than others. A group of guys known as OC Team Italy is one of them. They recently pushed an Intel Pentium 4 631 to over 8000MHz using an ASUS P5B with modified voltage regulation and liquid nitrogen. Overclocking is cool and all, but this extends beyond what some would perhaps call useful. Still a milestone though."

3 of 271 comments (clear)

  1. Re:The problem with high clock is not just heat .. by ettlz · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Indeed. Light travels just under 2 centimetres in the 16 GHz period. The Pentium 4 core is not much smaller than this... it seems like they're pushing their luck on order-of-magnitude estimates alone.

  2. Re:The problem with high clock is not just heat .. by indigest · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The extreme cooling they are doing is not just for removing the heat generated by the chip. As temperature decreases, the mobility of charge carriers increases, allowing for a faster circuit. In fact, if they were to run a supercooled chip at the nominal clock frequency, they would have hold time violations and the chip would not work. In other words, the data would propagate so quickly that it would corrupt the previous piece of data.

  3. Why not 8 GHz? by Snowgen · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Is 8000 MHz supposed to sound more impressive than 8 GHz?

    I'm just confused as to why it was worded so oddly.