Last week sacha35 and I went to HEXUS’s studios in north London to demonstrate extreme overclocking using liquid nitrogen on a Core i7 based system. Read on to find out! 

It was a wet and windy Monday morning, marginally warmer than the liquid nitrogen contained within the BOC Cryospeed truck sat outside HEXUS’s studios in north London. Paul “sacha35″ Watkinson and I have just arrived to show HEXUS just what it is that gets us out of bed so early on a Monday morning.   

So we start emptying the car and within 5 minutes, there’s 3-4 grand’s worth of kit sat on a table, ready to be stressed at less than -100C in the hope that we can break some world records. What’s first we think? A cup of tea. So after running things past Nick from HEXUS, we start by setting up the system to show just what it can do under ‘normal’ conditions.

• Intel Core i7 “Nehalem” 965 Extreme CPU 
• Asus Rampage II Extreme motherboard 
• Kingston HyperX DDR3-2000 1.65v  
• 2x Asus 4870X2 1GB 
• Thermaltake Toughpower 1200W 

Stock Intel heatsink, 4Ghz, 1.35v. How’d you like them apples?!  

The ease at which this system flew to 4Ghz and happily benched all the tests we wanted was encouraging for what was to follow. After briefly flirting with 4.2Ghz and seeing if it would achieve a 1Ghz overclock on the Intel cooler, we decided that it was time to get down to business. We stripped the system down, and started to set up for some extreme overclocking. 

Firstly, this would require some attention to detail with the motherboard. Despite being one of two Rampage II Extreme’s in the country, and possibly one of the best motherboard’s you’ll see for a Core i7 system, it still won’t run very well covered in water. To stop the condensation we’re going to get from a -100C lump of copper, we needed to insulate the area around the motherboard socket in order to keep it working.  

To do this, Paul used some kneaded eraser, or what’s sometimes called artist’s putty. Combined with some electrical tape to contain the putty, it was pushed in and around the CPU socket in order to fill the void and create an airtight seal so no moisture would develop in the important areas. Patience is the key at this point, rush this bit and you’re likely to need to break down the system and do this again in the middle of your benchmarks or you’ll end up with some rather expensive silicon-based paperweights.  

With the motherboard insulated, Paul started to set up the Kingpin F1 copper CPU pot, designed purely for maximum LN2 overclocking potential. Meanwhile I set about swapping the Kingston DDR3 because we had a special Corsair set up to evaluate. The Kingston set had done very well without any additional cooling, but with Corsair having provided a Nautilus 500 watercooling unit, ready to be hooked up to their new prototype thermo-electric cooling unit, we were excited to see what it could do. The results were pretty spectacular, and the DDR3 modules were overclocked from DDR3-1866 to DDR3-2200 at only 1.75v.

The watercooling enabled the TEC cooler to register 5C on the heatspreaders, causing some potential problems with condensation so this wont be for everyone, but it allowed Paul to push that little bit further.  

This RAM, combined with Paul working his magic to achieve a 5.1Ghz overclock from the Core i7 965 CPU, resulted in what was at the time, the SuperPi 1M World Record and is still the wPrime 32M and 1024M Core i7 World Records. 

HEXUS have got some video coverage of the day, check them out:

The Hardware

On Air

On LN2

Record Breakers!

All in all, this wrapped up a fun day benching in HEXUS’ labs showing them just how we do what we do.