The Phenom II X4 has been shown to be an excellent overclocker, and recently the world record was set by a group called Limit Team, who took the 3.2GHz stock processor and took it up to an insane 7127Hz. That’s an increase of just over 221%. Of course, while with good ventilation you could probably overclock yours a good 10-15% with no ill effects, this particular hack required “exotic cooling materials” in AMD’s words. Does that mean… like a piña colada?

Actually, it means liquid nitrogen and the much colder and much more difficult to come by liquid helium. Liquid helium can drop the temperature to -240 degrees — 33 colder and you’re at absolute zero. Of course, it’s not exactly easy to use and the results it enables are hardly indicative of real-world performance, but it’s still pretty awesome.

It takes a pretty specialized setup to get these kinds of results, but checking these crazy rigs can give you good tips for when you’re building your own system and want to know what the pros are using.

[via Tom's Hardware]