As many know, I do some tinkering with computers. While this isn’t my doings, I enjoyed it and thought you might too. Here’s the screencap of the CPU speed program, note the red underline.
I got a chuckle out of how this was achieved on a six core Intel Core i7 CPU. I suppose if you really need the speed, sure, why not? The video below explains it all. Be sure to wear gloves and a facemask if you try this at home.
They write on the Gigabyte blog:
Hey guys, here’s a quick shout out to everyone about another new feature we have with the X58A-OC board called OC Touch. It’s essentially a hardware level overclocking feature capable of adjusting the multiplier and bclock on the fly in or out of the operating system.
I’ve got a video here that hicookie made today to give you an idea how it works. He’s got the new Core i7 990X installed, LN2 pot running at -170C+, CPU boots at 6.4Ghz (178*36) and then gets clocked up using OC Touch bclock buttons to 7.1GHz (197*36). Easy!
Yes, that’s liquid nitrogen you see being poured into the CPU cooler.
BTW if you want the program, CPU-Z for your own use, it is free here.I find it useful since it saves me having to open up the case on the many machines I run at my business to figure out what is inside when we need to do some sort of fix or update.
http://www.cpuid.com/softwares/cpu-z.html
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They overclocked a pesky Pentium IV to over 5Ghz the same way five years ago.
Charlie Sheen isn’t half the Vatican Assassin Warlock the elite of the elite OCers are.
I was happy to take my i7 2600k up to 4.4ghz on air and call it a day.
The real pros use liquid helium. 🙂
I would think that even with the super cooling that taxes a cpu’s lifespan considerably. Still that is way cool to see. Makes me wonder what they could do with a better heat dissipation system build into the cores. This is interesting. Thanks Anthony
If only the MET office had this technology…
LOL!!!
I needed a good laugh.
If you’re serious, you’ll need a good LN dewar….here’s a link for ya….
http://www.coleparmer.com/catalog/product_index.asp?cls=2642
(you can get ’em a lot cheaper from other sources, ebay included)
If you’re really ambitious, you could set up an account with Airgas for periodic drops of a 280.. Mind, if you’re in a business, you may need to post a “Suffocation Hazard” sign because of the potential for oxygen displacement. If at home, just tell your wife it’s a new subwoofer that’s really, really cool.
The best part of having LN around? Some of the BEST ice cream you’ve ever had!!!
There’s a good reason for maintaining a CPU in a limited speed. See Apple for instance. Overclocking any CPU, as William Mason said, has a cost and, without appropriate care in a cooling system, can burn your hardware. And of course, overclocking can increase your CO2 footprint and you will be doomed by a runway greenhouse effect originated at your home 😉
Sent this to a Geek buddy of mine- his reply:”Been there, done that, my wife still
hasn’t forgiven me about the cat…”
He wouldn’t go any further…
I remember some of the fun stuff we’d do with hardware locks in the old SLOTA/B designed processors. Taking a 266/300mhz processor and overlocking it to 667, sometimes if you got lucky you could push 900mhz out of them. Pretty impressive back then. The real problem of course is the cacheing on CPU’s anyway. The CPU itself? Rock solid stable 99% of the time, the L1/L2/L3/L4 cache? Not so much. Too much voltage? Fried, too hot, fried, too cold, won’t work, etc. Which is why you could get that 266/300mhz processor at pushing 1ghz with trial, error, voltage tweaking and sometimes water cooling.
Of course the reason why we have hardware locks on CPU’s is two fold. First it prevents resilking a die(really really common back in the 90’s/early 2000’s. You could get Cyrix marked as Intel, AMD as Intel, Cyrix as AMD, lower speed cpu’s remarked at higher). Meaning lower quality bumped to a higher CPU type, or brand. The second is to ensure a the market has what it needs. Lot’s of CPU’s can be clocked higher than their stock speed, because they were underclocked to fill the market’s need for a specific speed. Or have cores turned off and so on.
CPU-Z is good program, I have been using it for over ten years.
Anthony to take a windowed screen shot press ALT+Print Screen and then paste the image into a graphics program.
REPLY: that only works if you have the screen in the first place…this is video shot by the Gigabyte company. – Anthony
Looks like the memory needs cooling, too. It’s glowing red.
William Mason says: May 3, 2011 at 3:48 pm
. . . Makes me wonder what they could do with a better heat dissipation system build into the cores. . . .
The best system would be to use diamond as a substrate. I believe Apollo Diamond is working on that. They had grown 1/8th inch thick diamond sheets a couple years ago.
Awesome.
Mike McMillan says:
May 3, 2011 at 4:21 pm
Looks like the memory needs cooling, too. It’s glowing red.
Showing my age, but I worked on a core memory design back in the day. The memory was 32k x 16. Each bit was in it’s own array on the board. We were using temperature independent core from Ampex, and to really test it we put a plexiglass cover over the core mat instead of the metal cover. Then we’d excercise one single address at CPU speed with a memory tester, and would keep writing zeros so the inhibit circuits were turned on 100% of the time.
You could see 16 tiny glowing red ferrite cores inside the bake in oven.
And yes, I remember when this was high tech!
Am getting old.
Mike McMillan says:
May 3, 2011 at 4:21 pm
“Looks like the memory needs cooling, too. It’s glowing red.”
Actually I think that is the orange empty socket behind the memory.
I think the new Chuck Norris CPU from Intel doesn’t need liquid nitrogen. It is cooled with a “round house” fan or something and runs faster than any CPU in history.
That just made my geek molecules vibrate!
The problem is current technology is pathetic. According to Landauer’s principle energy dissipation in an information processing device is only inevitable whenever a bit gets deleted. This energy depends on the operating temperature T of the device and it is kT ln 2, where k is the Boltzmann constant (1.38×10‾²³ JK‾¹), which means Landauer’s constant is about 10‾²³ JK‾¹. This number is extremely small compared to what present day computer hardware does.
Let’s suppose a device operating at 100 GHz discards 10 Mbit in each clock cycle with an operating temperature of 1000 K. This is way beyond what is possible at the moment, still, if it were optimal in a thermodynamic sense, it would only dissipate 1 mW.
One could do even better with reversible computing, where bits only get deleted when it is really necessary, that is, when memory starts to fill up.
DJ says: May 3, 2011 at 3:56 pm “Mind, if you’re in a business, you may need to post a “Suffocation Hazard” sign because of the potential for oxygen displacement.”
A small defense contractor building transmitters for the Navy had a little trouble with that concept. They locked a guy in an enclosed room with nothing but passive ventilation to do environmental testing: transmitters on nitrogen cold plate simply vented right in the room.
He managed to crawl out before he — quite — passed out. And wondered what was wrong with himself. I just looked at the test set up and reminded him that carbon-based lifeforms of our sort require some oxygen (unlike AGW types who are apparently carbon-free silicon-based forms).
One fun little fact about playing with liquid nitrogen. If air comes in contact with it, oxygen will condense into it as it has a higher boiling point. When the liquid has almost boiled off, the last little bit will be pure oxygen. This has led to a few oopsies over the years.
In the late 1970s we used a LN2 cooled planar lithium drifted silicon radiation detector made by Ortec at Oak Ridge. The problem was, we located it 250 km East of Darwin in the hot Tropics of Australia, in a bush community of about 50 people. It had to be flown in to our home-made airstrip in a Dewar of 10 gallons or so. This had a loose fitting cap to avoid pressure buildup, but if the pilot hit a bump and sloshed the liquid around, the cabin could fill with mist depending on humidity etc. I think they have changed the aviation code now. The LN2 was most useful for cooling beer cans, but we did not use it to overclock the processor, which was Digital Equipment Corp PDP 8-e, with 8 K of core memory IIRC, which was fast enough for us. I’m getting old, too.
There is a guy on you tube somewhere who has immersed his entire computer in an aquarium filled with mineral oil. (with the case off). Looked pretty interesting.
If Jeremy Clarkson was a geek… Moar power!!!!!
I’d be interested in what memory is being used and what the timings and voltage are.
BTW, for thous who are not hobbyists, this is just like drag racing. Long term stability is not an issue, and an early death of the “engine” is to be expected. Getting that CPU-Z screen cap is the whole point.
Looks like a lot of work just to bring Microsoft windows up to the speed of other OSes.