What a ridiculous project! But how awesome would it be to be the hardcore system building nerds they asked to do this? A couple months ago, a French Tom’s Hardware-related superteam got together to overclock an Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4GHz as far as it would go. They just put up the pictures and everything yesterday. They used liquid nitrogen cooling and a pretty serious-looking compressor to suck the heat right out of the thing, and ended up more than doubling the cycles. For reference, it’s generally safe to overclock your stock hardware about five percent, and even the real pros get maybe an extra thirty percent — and at that point you’re risking a lot of errors, artifacts, and so on. If you’ve ever wondered what liquid nitrogen cooling looks like in motion, check out the video (en Francais).

So congratulations to the team, but watch out for this guy (two years ago).