The Mac Pro isn’t exactly known for being a terribly loud computer, but I guess you can make it even quieter by adding liquid cooling. Of course, it’s not Apple approved so adding this type of technology will no doubt void your warranty, but it would give you the ability to overclock your machine. In fact, this is exactly what someone from Asetek did; added liquid cooling to an 8-Core Mac Pro, and then overclocked it from 2.8Ghz to 3.16Ghz. The end result? An extremely fast workstation that generates almost no noise. Check out the video (with a performance comparison) after the jump: → Read More
A while back I went to a fun overclocking event held by AMD, where there was a lot of vapor, some exploding burritos, and some overclocking that got tantalizingly close to 7GHz. It was just an arbitrary number, and they broke a bunch of other records, but they couldn’t quite hit that last target. But a few months and I can only guess how much liquid helium later, they nailed it. → Read More
<img src="http://old.crunchgear.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/header.jpg" class="center" I'm eating lunch in the conference here in AMD's Lone Star campus while they're getting their custom cooling setup down to -250°F. Yes, -250°F, 120 degrees above absolute zero. Then they’re going to go for a couple world records while pouring liquid Helium onto the processor. It’s kind of awesome, in a really nerdy sort of way. We’ve got a gallery here and we’ll have video tonight or tomorrow; it’s actually pretty cool to watch. → Read More
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? → Read More
Australia, land of kangaroos and terrible actors, must be beaming today, what with the news that someone there was able to overclock an Intel Atom processor to 2.38GHz. That’s the fastest we’ve ever seen an Atom run, as a matter of fact. Of course, getting the processor, found in an MSI Wind, to run that was quite the challenge, as it should be. Not since Frankenstein pieced together his monster did someone go to such lengths to accomplish anything. What does running an Atom at 2.38GHz gain you, aside from bragging rights? Nothing, I would guess, which is about par for the course when it comes to overclocking. It’s the old Slashdot axiom, “Because you can.” → Read More
This is pretty cool. I’m all for tweaking your setup a little bit, but the guys at this Gigabyte-sponsored Championship in Taipei take it more seriously than I ever could. Maybe that’s because there was a $5000 prize at stake. Hmm… The pictures are great if you’re a system builder: all cables and pipes and thermoses (thermi?) filled with liquid nitrogen. They had 11 full canisters for the participants to work their way through; now that’s a sign that this is a serious competition. There’s a lot to the story and if you’re an overclocker yourself, it’s definitely worth a look. For the record, a Finnish team called Sweden-2 took top honors but the Americans took home the “freestyle” prize. We tied with the Russkies for 2nd place overall, but they had a higher 3DMark score so they took the silver. Next time, Boris. Next time. → Read More
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). → Read More
But at what cost? This tool from ZDNet allows for super-easy overclocking of your Mac Pro. Until recently, overclocking has been one of the few remaining legs Windows users had up on Mac users, from an objective standpoint at least. The OC tools I’ve used on XP have ranged from the graphic to the obscure, and from the stable to the ridiculous. This ZDNet tool looks pretty simple, but being simple, it’s not really comprehensive. This is evident from the fact that multiple errors occur reliably while using the tool: the time gets messed up, it can’t restart without crashing past certain speeds, and the clockspeeds reset themselves when your machine goes to sleep — among other issues. → Read More
It was just a matter of time before someone overclocked the hell out of one of these things. Thanks to a user named bdleonard over at the OLPC News Forum, you can really kick that 433MHz AMD Geode up a couple notches. One user was able to get his humming along at 566MHz, although he did report that the back of the screen got “noticeably warmer.” Anyway, it’s not for the faint of heart and if you’re a small child reading this post from an OLPC, don’t try this without your parents’ permission. Although you’re reading CrunchGear, your parents probably mailed it in quite some time ago — maybe go get them a carton of smokes instead of relying on their overclocking judgment. How to overclock your OLPC [OLPC News Forums] → Read More
Due to too many returns on GeForce 7900 GT, Nvidia is forbidding its partners from overclocking the upcoming G80 cards, according to The Inquirer. The site backs up the report by bringing up how Nvidia locked down overclocking on the dual-GPU 7950 GX2 cards. However, I4U is calling bullshit on it, since its in possession of an overclocked XFX 7950 GX2 XXX. I have to agree with I4U on this one. There are a number of vendors that make their money on factory-overclocked cards that to cut out the market entirely wouldn’t be the wisest move. Let’s bet on this just being scare tactics from Nvidia so that it can sell more expensive cards with faster clock speeds. NVIDIA Says No to G80 Overclocking? [I4U via The Inquirer] → Read More
While Intel and AMD might be doing more to lower the operating temperatures of their processors, overclocking them still causes some high temps, especially if the case is chockfull of other performance components. This generally causes builders and buyers to switch to effiecient-yet-costly liquid-cooling systems. Vigor Gaming, a small gaming PC vendor, has been investing in another solution, though: the Monsoon Active TEC CPU Cooling System. Here’s Vigor’s explaination on how it works: The thermoelectric cooler (TEC), or Peltier Cooler, is a solid-state heat pump that uses the Peltier effect to move heat. The modern commercial TEC consists of a number of p- and n- type semiconductor couples connected electrically in series and thermally in parallel. These couples are sandwiched between two thermally conductive and electrically insulated substrates. The heat’s pumping direction can be changed by altering the polarity of the charging DC current. Did you get all that? Well, just know that it’s an efficient way to cool an overclocked processor without the headaches or expense of setting up a liquid-cooling system inside your PC. At least it is according to a review on ExtremeTech. The site says while the first version was less than impressive, the second-generation pulls off dropping the temperature as promised. Albeit, at the cost of $149 and some above-average fan noise. Vigor Gaming Updates Its Peltier-on-a-Chip Cooler [ExtremeTech] Vigor Gaming Monsoon II [Product page] → Read More
