French Claim Overclocking World Record

Back in February, a French team that is part of Tom's Hardware managed to double the cycles of an Intel Core 2 Quad 6600 2.4GHz. Now, nearly five months later they are bragging about it, claiming a world record with an overclocked speed of 5.1GHz.

They also apparently just got around to posting some very cool pictures and a video of the milestone. Kudos for the speed record guys, but you won't win any speed records for posting test results and pictures of the accomplishment.

The team, 13 members strong, used liquid nitrogen to cool down the Intel processor. In liquid form, nitrogen boils at -196 Celsius. The canister used to cool the processor was set on top of the CPU, where a standard cooling system would be.

Foam was used to insulate parts of the DFI DK-P35 motherboard that could have been damaged by condensation. The configuration had 1GB DIMM of DDR2 memory and a Geforce 8800 GTS 512MB graphics card. The team disabled two of the four cores of the processor and managed to stabilize its temperature at around -125 Celsius by pouring liquid nitrogen.

This resulted in 5,112 MHz obtained by overclocking a Core 2 Quad 6600 at (the usual speed) 2.4 GHz. Just for reference, stock hardware is safe to overclock for five percent, with professionals managing a thirty percent rate by risking many errors along the way.

It's unclear whether the team will be going the same route as Mozilla who decided to work with the Guinness World Record folks when declaring largest number of software downloads in 24 hours for its Firefox 3 browser.

CREDIT: PC World contributor Daniel Ionescu filed this blog.

Comments

This would be the first victory of any kind for France since the French Revolution. Congraulations!!!

klacour

July 31, 2008

2:20 PM PT

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