In for a world record ?

On Friday and Saturday, two of Belgians' finest overclockers went to Alternate. Friday Blind represented Madshrimps, on Saturday it was Massman who did his job. Both trying their best to reach the highest frequencies and scores by pushing the hardware to the maximum.

Massman had some bad luck. The Intel E8600 setup he brought with him worked fine at 6,4 Ghz at home, but on location he got it barely stable at 6,2 Ghz. After hours of fine tuning he decided to run the system at a mere 6,1 Ghz. Using a modded Nvidia 9600 GT he as aiming to break the world record 3D mark 01 in that cards' category. He cooled the video card with LN2 which helped overclocking quite well, benching at 1050 Mhz core and 2100 Mhz Memory wasn't a problem. It were the shader clocks that were holding him back. Nevertheless he achieved a very nice score of 95150 Marks. Not the world record, but a respectable (3rd place out of 100+ scores.






Massman preparing his setup.

On Friday Blind was very close to a world record, highest CPU speed ever…

Test platform and preparation

Test Setup
CPU	Intel Celeron 352 (Cedarmill core)
Mainboard	Asus P5B Premium with Vcore and Vdroop mod.
Videocard	XFX 8800GT
Memory	2 Gb DDR2 Geil @ 338.2 MHz (1:1) @ 4-4-4-10
Power supply	OCZ 1000 watt
Other	Windows XP SP3 minimum Install Dragon F1EE with LN2

On Friday he started preparing the bench table and his setup. Using gum to fill up the gaps around the socket to prevent condensation, installing the CPU and the cooling tube, he was ready to start benching. The highly rated Dragon F1 Extreme Edition LN2 Cooler made by K|ngP|n was used.

As he is a man of little words, he didn't write a step by step guide, he just started pouring the liquid nitrogen. Some time later we heard rumors that he achieved some nice scores, but we had to wait until blind himself got home and online.

The result

The cpu comes with a stock frequency of 3,2 Ghz and a bus speed of 133 (533) Mhz. On air the chip did about 5,7 Ghz (+78%), on the cascade phase change cooling speeds of close to 7 Ghz(118%) were reached, but the LN2 pushed the chip over the 8 Ghz barrier. To achieve this, the CPU was fed close to 1,9 Volt. Pushing it higher wasn't possible, as the overvoltage protection wasn't bypassed yet on this motherboard. But already a high voltage, seen that the stock voltage is around 1,3 volt.

Clock and bus speed more then doubled. Power circuits heavily tortured. LN2 quickly vaporizing. And the chip pushed to an astonishing 8116 Mhz (+153%!):


This is not a modified screenshot, proven by the Validation link.

This result is the second highest clock speed achieved as listed by HWbot!