5GHz barrier pwned by Tomshardware and liquid nitrogen!

lukexcom · Post by **lukexcom** » 2003-12-30 03:00pm

A huge tank of liquid nitrogen, a custom-made copper alloy pipe and head, a custom-built Asus motherboard, and one insane overclocking team results in:

5.25 GHz at -196 deg C

Brother-Captain Gaius · Post by **Brother-Captain Gaius** » 2003-12-30 03:03pm

Holy gods.

CmdrWilkens · Post by **CmdrWilkens** » 2003-12-30 04:27pm

May the insanity never cease...next time I want them to just dip the whole damn thing, motherboard and all, inside liquid nitrogen and run it from there

Hamel · Post by **Hamel** » 2003-12-30 05:04pm

I bow down

Tolya · Post by **Tolya** » 2003-12-30 05:22pm

My friend's dad, who works in the electronics industry estimated that above the 4.5Ghz there will be no performance gain (or really minimal). Anyone would like to comment on this/verify?

Im no expert in hardware - and this calls for some hardcore knowledge way beyond my skills, so Im just going to ask some of you experts out there.

aerius · Post by **aerius** » 2003-12-30 05:29pm

Impressive, very impressive, though I'm surprised they didn't have to build an off-board voltage regulator unit to power the whole setup. I do notice that they modified the existing supply, still...that can't be good for the poor thing.

Pu-239 · Post by **Pu-239** » 2003-12-30 05:30pm

Too bad when the ice crystals melt everything will be screwed.

Shinova · Post by **Shinova** » 2003-12-30 05:32pm

Supercomputers already have their cpus and stuff dipped in liquid nitrogen I think.

Vertigo1 · Post by **Vertigo1** » 2003-12-30 05:38pm

You know what's sad? I've got a friend with an XP1700 that gets a better overclock than they did with that P4.

He's got his chip upto 2.6GHz (from the default 1.45GHz) Thats with air cooling too.

The Kernel · Post by **The Kernel** » 2003-12-30 05:58pm

Bah. The Japanese pull this kind of shit all the time. It's interesting, but not really all that informative.

EmperorMing · Post by **EmperorMing** » 2003-12-30 11:50pm

When the bus and periphrials can talk at that speed, then I'm interested.

Even though it is good bragging rights.

lukexcom · Post by **lukexcom** » 2003-12-31 12:16am

What, 1237mhz on the FSB not good enough for you?

And not to mention the RAM bottleneck they had there...

Pu-239 · Post by **Pu-239** » 2003-12-31 01:24am

Doesn't THG have a strong intel bias too?

Pu-239 · Post by **Pu-239** » 2003-12-31 01:26am

EmperorMing wrote:When the bus and periphrials can talk at that speed, then I'm interested.

Even though it is good bragging rights.

Bah- the money they spent on that could have been spent on a nice Power4 or dual Opteron workstation.

Post by **Darth Wong** » 2003-12-31 02:15am

Pu-239 wrote:Doesn't THG have a strong intel bias too?

No, although many people have accused them of bias. When they make a judgement, they do it with vehemence, and with no sugar-coating or ass-kissing. Frankly, I like that about them.

When AMD was kicking Intel's ass and Intel was having all those problems with defective chipsets, flaky CPUs, etc., they were ranting about what jack-offs the Intel people were, and people called them AMD fanboys. When the P4 really started coming into its own as the premiere high-end CPU (albeit costly; Athlon beats it for price/performance ratio), they updated as necessary, and suddenly people were saying they're Intel fanboys.

darthdavid · Post by **darthdavid** » 2003-12-31 06:13pm

Well that'll be one dead system after the ice melts.

General Zod · Post by **General Zod** » 2003-12-31 06:22pm

5.25 GhZ. . .sweet god. . . . .i want one of them puppies! course since the 3.0 GhZ barrier has been broken it's only a matter of time until we see commercial 5.0+ GhZ chips

EmperorMing · Post by **EmperorMing** » 2003-12-31 11:14pm

lukexcom wrote:What, 1237mhz on the FSB not good enough for you?
And not to mention the RAM bottleneck they had there...

That's the problem. Bottlenecks in the ram and periphrials. Get those up to speed and you'll have a really fast comp.

SPOOFE · Post by **SPOOFE** » 2004-01-01 05:40pm

In another two years, when we're approaching 10+ ghz chips, people will look back on this and scratch their heads...

Bottlenecks in the ram and periphrials. Get those up to speed and you'll have a really fast comp.

For some larger applications, like large photo editing or film editing, the bottleneck is in the hard drive, and that bottleneck will be cured when solid-state hard drives surpass platter hard drives in terms of price/storage ratio.

Pu-239 · Post by **Pu-239** » 2004-01-01 07:14pm

SPOOFE wrote:In another two years, when we're approaching 10+ ghz chips, people will look back on this and scratch their heads...

Bottlenecks in the ram and periphrials. Get those up to speed and you'll have a really fast comp.
For some larger applications, like large photo editing or film editing, the bottleneck is in the hard drive, and that bottleneck will be cured when solid-state hard drives surpass platter hard drives in terms of price/storage ratio.

Bah. There's RAID(yes I know, not as fast as solid state, but it's an improvement). And for photo editing, isn't all the data read into RAM and edited from there? How large does a picture have to be to exceed 1GB?

I don't know how images are stored in memory so rough calcs-
1073741824 bits (1GB) = 1024 MB*1024KB*1024bits

Assuming 48 bits per pixel (high end photo editing), 1073741824/48 gives about 22369621 free pixels to play w/. Sqrt that, and you have a 4729x4729 picture, but most images are compressed on HDD and are probably stored more efficiently in memory with low cpu intensity optimizations, so bleh.

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2004-01-01 07:46pm

Pu-239 wrote:Bah. There's RAID(yes I know, not as fast as solid state, but it's an improvement). And for photo editing, isn't all the data read into RAM and edited from there? How large does a picture have to be to exceed 1GB?

Bigger than what the average person uses, but probably not uncommon in the professional world. Data is read into memory (virtual or physical) when its loaded.

Assuming 48 bits per pixel (high end photo editing), 1073741824/48 gives about 22369621 free pixels to play w/. Sqrt that, and you have a 4729x4729 picture, but most images are compressed on HDD and are probably stored more efficiently in memory with low cpu intensity optimizations, so bleh.

Images may be compressed on the hard drive, yes, but they're loaded as bitmaps into memory. You're also assuming single-layer images, when most people have a bunch of layers and other things on it. Furthermore, many professionals have multiple things open, its not as if they're just keeping one image open at a time.

SPOOFE · Post by **SPOOFE** » 2004-01-01 08:01pm

And for photo editing, isn't all the data read into RAM and edited from there?

In Paintshop Pro, yes. In Photoshop, it can use hard drive space if need be, for larger projects.

Sqrt that, and you have a 4729x4729 picture, but most images are compressed on HDD and are probably stored more efficiently in memory with low cpu intensity optimizations, so bleh.

Feh. Just this summer, while doing work on a display banner, I was working with images at 20,000x25,000 pixels. I ultimately had to accept the loss in quality and scale everything down into the 4,000 pixel range, due to PSP's limitation.

Then when you consider that some scanners can do 4800 dpi, with a 17" picture...

Of course, the REAL advantage of solid state will be durability and the fact that the HD won't require the use of CPU cycles.

Hethrir · Post by **Hethrir** » 2004-01-01 08:19pm

I don't care what anyone says (an amazing amount actually), THG is the best and always will be. This article simply re-inforces the ground breaking work they do.

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2004-01-01 08:40pm

SPOOFE wrote:Of course, the REAL advantage of solid state will be durability and the fact that the HD won't require the use of CPU cycles.

Unfortunately, solid-state drives have the minor limitation of needing a battery to keep power to them at all times

The Kernel · Post by **The Kernel** » 2004-01-01 09:55pm

phongn wrote:
SPOOFE wrote:Of course, the REAL advantage of solid state will be durability and the fact that the HD won't require the use of CPU cycles.
Unfortunately, solid-state drives have the minor limitation of needing a battery to keep power to them at all times

Not necessarily. Most of the next-gen solid state drives use non-volatile memory designs.

Also, most hard drive manufacturers see holographic storage, not solid state as the future of storage technology.