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MSI Wind U100, Overclocked With Liquid Nitrogen

Posted by timothy on from the it's-a-free-world-baby dept.

james writes "What do you get when you combine a MSI Wind U100 notebook with liquid nitrogen? The new Intel Atom frequency World Record ... and some damn cool pictures! A large copper pot is used, sitting on top of the GPU and chipset, and cold transfer through the original heatsink plate to the CPU. This was cooled down to about -20 C to achieve the new world mark. (Intel Atom N270 @ 2315mhz) For more information you can check out the original forum thread.

10 of 95 comments (clear)

  1. Bonus by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    +5 hack points for being completely impractical. I like...

  2. Man oh man... by T.E.D. · · Score: 4, Funny

    ...and you thought it was bad when your laptop's battery started leaking into your lap. Just wait until its liquid nitrogen cooling system starts leaking.

  3. The REALLY impressive thing... by KingSkippus · · Score: 4, Funny

    This was cooled down to about -20 to achieve the new world mark.

    The really impressive thing isn't that they overclocked a processor, it's that they cooled it to -20 K!

  4. All this shows is that Atom is clock limited by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    All this shows is that Atom is clock limited by design. A 700MHz speed up - less than 50% in this case - from using liquid nitrogen? And all to get a CPU that's about as powerful as a 1.5GHz Pentium M or a 1.2GHz Core 2 Duo ...

    Atom is reasonably neat, but I would have been more impressed with under-volting to half power consumption. Or designing a better chipset.

  5. side-effects of mod cooling? by v1 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I've always wondered why things like this don't cause physical problems related to thermal expansion/contraction - why doesn't the processor package crack due to the temp differences? Or condensation form in bad places etc? There's gotta be a whole list of bad side effects to worry about when supercooling one part of your computer...?

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    1. Re:side-effects of mod cooling? by Eccles · · Score: 5, Funny

      I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.

      Which one?

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    2. Re:side-effects of mod cooling? by Chief+Camel+Breeder · · Score: 4, Informative

      You might think so, but silicon seems to deal with it OK. When I worked in astronomical instrumentation, we built LN2-cooled CCD cameras with the chips cooled to about -150 deg C (they had heaters in the cryostats to hold this temperature; they went down to about -200 if the heaters were turned off). These things were thermal-cycled many times a year and we rarely lost a chip. Astro CCDs are big chips, albeit very simple compared to CPUs.

      Conversely, detectors cooled to liquid helium temperatures are likely to die if cycled up to room temperature a few times.

      With the CCD cryostats, the chips were in a vacuum vessel, so condensation wasn't normally a problem; all the water had been sucked out before cooling. If moisture did get in, then they had to be warmed and re-evacuated.

    3. Re:side-effects of mod cooling? by Lumpy · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Not really. you cant get condensation because there is no air with moisture anywhere near the motherboard. All that nitrogen is displacing the air faster than the air knows what to do. Same with overclocking with Co2.. No condensation.

      Now supercool it, then yank it out of the cooling bath, yes it will grow frost faster than anything. I killed my first K6 processor by using a over sized peltier cooler. I cooled it faster than the processor could create heat... I frosted the motherboard for a 3 inch circle around the processor, something melted some of the frost and it shorted two power pins and it went POOF.

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    4. Re:side-effects of mod cooling? by squoozer · · Score: 4, Informative

      My guess as to why chips last so well when thermally cycled would be because they undergo very little contraction as they cool. Microchips are made from extremely pure single crystals of silicon (essentially) so they are already in a very low energy state. Cooling them down isn't going to change very much. I wouldn't be surprised if newer SOI chips break more often when thermally cycled as they are in a higher energy state to begin with. Anyway, I have no evidence of this, just a gut feel from studying materials at a wide range of temperatues.

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  6. ob. Futurama reference... by Tastecicles · · Score: 5, Funny

    first one, then t'other.

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