Extreme overclocking

Posted at: Tuesday 28th February 2006 by Ben Hardwidge

They destroy expensive components for fun, they dabble with liquid nitrogen and they even mod beer coolers into PC cooling systems. Ben Hardwidge speaks to the extreme overclockers

Imagine that you've just spent £400 on an exclusive new graphics card. Any rational person would then get it home and treat it like a Ming vase, because you only need to knock off a capacitor and you'll have just dropped almost half a grand down the toilet. This isn't how everybody treats their top-end components though. Believe it or not, there are some people who will happily overclock their pricey elitist kit until it goes up in smoke.

Let's take Barry, for example, who is also known as bazx on the www.extremeprometeia.com forums. 'I'm basically going to blow up one of my 7800 GTXs,' Barry eagerly tells me. 'I'm going to take it way past its limits.' When I spoke to Barry, he was in the process of organising a 'liquid nitrogen' weekend at his place in Surrey on 28 December, during which he planned to destroy his £400 graphics card while overclocking it.

An outsider's immediate reaction to this is usually one of both bewilderment and despair, and you'd be forgiven for sobbing into your elbow while muttering, 'But someone could have used that graphics card!' However, that would make you sound like a moaning old grandparent. After all, it's no less ridiculous than Pete Townshend impetuously smashing up his guitar at the end of a gig, or a film director spending a fortune on a life-size model of a city just to blow it up. It's getting the best result and making your statement that counts, and that's what extreme overclocking is all about - being the best.

'I used to race motorcycles,' says Barry, 'but I'm getting too fat and old for that, so I'm racing computers instead. It's about pushing stuff to its limits and beyond. You're finding out what your hardware can do.' Another top overclocker, Andrew Edwards, explains that 'the motivation is simple: to top the benchmark charts or be the fastest ever'. Andrew is currently at the top of the Custom PC Media Benchmarks leaderboard with an overall score of 1.90 (www.custompc.co.uk), although you'll also find him in the top ten leaderboards of all sorts of other benchmarks too, often using the moniker Maverik-sg1. Andrew is currently ranked third on the world PCMark05 leaderboard, and at number 13 on the 3DMark05 leaderboard, with a stunning score of 16,642.

It's a phase

So what do you have to do to achieve these highly enviable results? Your first step is to get outside of the restrictions of air and water cooling, and venture into the sub-zero world of phase-change coolers. Essentially a refrigeration unit attached to your PC, the most popular mainstream models of these are the Prometeia Mach II and the Asetek VapoChill, although the community's opinion on these coolers is divided.

'Both units are great in their own right,' says Andrew, 'but I would choose the Mach II because a simple re-gas can give you brilliant results, and it's quieter than the VapoChill. The CPU mounts are easy to install on both units if you take your time.' However, Barry claims that 'the VapoChill is head and shoulders above the Mach II. It's all down to attention to detail. The mounts where you attach the Mach II to the CPU and motherboard are quite cumbersome, but the VapoChill has a tidy attachment that's very easy to use. Temperature-wise, they're much of a muchness though'.