[via TUAW]

Their video, far from the lighthearted hijinx and sloppy editing of my own, is a professional affair, dominated by some nu-metal that perfectly embodies the concept of overclocking. Well, that’s not really true. But it’s better than the constant hissing noise that is the soundtrack to mine.

As soon as I can cut my sweet footage and upload it, you’ll get to see that column of condensation blow up in real time. There’ll also be an official video with all the records and stuff coming from AMD in the next few days.

And also, we blew up some frozen watermelon and part of a burrito. You won’t see that on the official video.

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]

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.”

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.

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

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.

So why would you do it? Because an overclocked version of the cheapest Mac Pro on the market easily outperformed the most expensive available — a savings of $1600 if you care to track it that way. They made sure there were no errors in calculation, so I’d get this tool just to use as essentially a “Turbo” button (remember those?) for when you need to process a bunch of footage in Final Cut or something at high speed, and can then safely restart so your box doesn’t implode. Pretty bad-ass, actually. Get the tool here, and be sure to read the whole article so you know the risks.

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]

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]

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]