Pentium 4 2.8GHz OCed to 3.917GHz w/ Liquid Nitrogen PICS

[nissmo300]

When the Intel Pentium 4 2,8GHz CPU arrived to our testlab we ordered 10 liters of Liquid Nitrogen (LN2 -196°C) and decided to run some tests in very low temperatures.

After some adjusting and testing we were able to run SiSoft Sandra CPU and Memory benchmarks and Pifast benchmark smoothly when the CPU was running at 3917MHz. We raised the FSB one more step and managed to run succesfully SuperPi benchmark while CPU was running at 3998MHz. The result was 39 seconds.

Test setup: P4 2,8GHz, Modified Asus P4T533-C, Samsung PC800 RDRAM, PNY GeForce 4 MX440 and Windows XP OS.

Check out the pictures.

Of course, the practical problems of such a rig are that liquid nitrogen is rather difficult to work with, and quickly evaporates. Still, the test does indicate the dramatic speed-ups that result from cryogenic cooling. Supercomputers may one day work with cryogenic cooling, perhaps a 3D "cube" immersed in a liquid nitrogen bath, with cooling channels interspersed with circuitry. Such a configuration could have a high transistor density and be quite efficient.

[cjb1118]

This was done at Tom's hardware, except they got up to 5.255 GhZ!

But.. anyway, cool!