Video: Overclocking to 5.6GHz with liquid nitrogen

Posted at: 1:21am 3rd January 2008 by James Morris

The annual Benchtec UK LN2 meet plays it cool with Core 2 Quad CPUs running at 5.6GHz

Most people are pouring themselves warm glasses of mulled wine over the Christmas period, but the members of the Benchtec UK extreme overclocking forum were pouring themselves some liquid nitrogen in between Christmas and New Year. This is when the Annual LN2 Meet takes place, where a group of hardcore overclockers in the UK get together, chill their processors to -192ºC, and see how fast they will run – with potentially record-breaking results.

This year, proceedings took place at an office based on a stud farm in Surrey. Starting early in the day, the Benchtec UK team built their systems, tested them with simple air cooling, then bolted on their pots and started filling them with liquid nitrogen (LN2). The coolant arrived on a BOC Cryospeed truck earlier in the day, and was stored in keg-like containers until required – although regular thermos flasks were used to transfer the LN2 to the CPU pots.

High-end overclocking calls for high-end kit, and Benchtec UK was assisted by Intel and Asus with the processors and motherboards used at the LN2 meet. On show were quad-core CPUs, including the Core 2 Extreme QX9650 and QX9770, running on an Intel preview motherboard sporting its forthcoming X48 chipset, which officially supports a 1,600MHz FSB. There was even a Skulltrail sample equipped with twin Core 2 Extreme QX9775 chips, although these were only water-cooled with Asetek LCLCs, not LN2. In fact, Intel itself was in attendance in an unofficial capacity, with its own employees doing some of the benchmarking. Meanwhile, the LN2 pots were made by Little Devil, and were supplied by Aqua-PCs.

A fair proportion of the UK’s leading overclockers were vying for top slots, including sacha35, aka Paul Watkinson, maverick_sg1, aka Andrew Edwards, and of course bazx, aka Barry Wynd. However, the proceedings were beset with problems, as is often the case when hardware is pushed to its utmost limits. Maverik_sg1, blindfitter and sacha35 all had hardware failures, which prevented any useful benchmarking on the day. This was a shame, as sacha35 is currently the UK’s number one overclocker, and he had hoped to use the opportunity to move further up the world leaderboard from his current 65 slot.