PC gamers have all experienced slowdowns in their game machines at one time or another, and the quest to boost performance by overclocking and tweaking CPUs to run faster has become a national pastime of sorts (for PC nuts, at least). But one team of overclockers in Italy has outdone themselves in achieving unheard of speeds by getting a stock Pentium 4 chip to run at speeds surpassing 8GHz, according to bit-tech.net. In comparison, an unmodified P4 chip runs at a paltry 3GHz.
The feat was performed with an ample supply of liquid nitrogen, by engulfing a modified Asus P5B Deluxe motherboard and the attached P4 chip in the sub-zero solution. The results were recorded by the freeware computer diagnostic program, CPU-Z, and can be seen here. CPU-Z Validator’s Hall of Fame reports that this is the highest frequency ever recorded with an overclocked X86 processor.
But before there is a rush to put together custom rigs such as the one described, remember that the cost of liquid nitrogen is approximately $2 a gallon. While this may not seem like an overly high price to obtain cryogenic temperatures needed for the overclocking experiment, the rub is that liquid nitrogen is usually sold in batches of 45 to 60 gallon quantities. And as LN2 virtually boils away instantaneously at room temperatures, the possibility of extending the high clock rates for any extended length of time with a liquid nitrogen setup seems rather dubious.
