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Cooling: "Liquid Nitrogen" reminds me of the amazing day when somebody first overclocked a slot based AMD Athlon to 1.0 GHz using a custom refrigerant loop syst
by walrus01 6y ago
Cooling: "Liquid Nitrogen" reminds me of the amazing day when somebody first overclocked a slot based AMD Athlon to 1.0 GHz using a custom refrigerant loop system.
- FuckButtons 6y agoCooling with Liquid nitrogen is in some ways simpler than a refrigerator cycle since it’s completely impractical to compress & recondense it. A cryogenic cooling system usually just vents the gas into the room, it may just be a little well around the part which gets filled with ln2 from a dewar.
- walrus01 6y agoIndeed so, I remember seeing people do temporary "overclocking world records" with things like 900 MHz Pentium 3s, and Athlons, around twenty years ago, bare motherboard on an open table with liquid nitrogen dewar mounted to the CPU socket. Guys pouring more nitrogen into the thing as it evaporates and they run benchmarks. I guess the procedure for that probably hasn't changed very much, since it's a very ephemeral and temporary process.
- galangalalgol 6y agoDo you need some form of sonicator to keep bubbles from sticking?
- analog31 6y agoNot in practice. I deal with LN2 cooled optical detectors, and the bubbles clear themselves out pretty quickly. Sometimes folks add a little bit of sand to help the bubbles nucleate.
- trashtester 6y ago> A cryogenic cooling system usually just vents the gas into the room, it may just be a little well around the part which gets filled with ln2 from a dewar. It depends on the scale, and whether the cooling is only required for a short while. Large scale cryogenics (such as at CERN, an LNG tanker etc) will recompress the vapor as it forms. If so, the loop basically IS as refrigerator, just a much bigger, higher performing unit. For an extreme example, see: https://home.cern/science/engineering/cryogenics-low-temperatures-high-performance https://home.cern/science/engineering/cryogenics-low-tempera...
- FuckButtons 6y agoTrue, I should have qualified the phrase impractical by stating at this scale. it’s an industrial scale process that because of the pressures and temperatures involved isn’t practical to use for anyone who isn’t permanently installing it at significant capital outlay - which, wouldn’t be practical for cooling any cpu other than maybe a supercomputer.
- saganus 6y agoThe Kryotech SuperG! http://www.thg.ru/cpu/19991115/print.html http://www.thg.ru/cpu/19991115/print.html That was mindblasting for me at the time and remember I dreamed of buying one. Now I have a multi-ghz Ryzen 270p.. not even the latest and gratest and take it for granted. Those were the days...
- walrus01 6y agoIt's unfortunate that the images seem to be gone now, because I remember it being quite a feat of engineering for its era. It looks like there's some shots of it here: https://www.anandtech.com/show/432/2 https://www.anandtech.com/show/432/2
- kirse 6y agoMan what a throwback, memories I forgot I had. I was all about upgrading my K6-2 450 to a 550, but was equally fun to cheer on AMD's Slot A chips that had begun to erase Intel's dominance at the time.
- qzw 6y agoThe peak of tech excitement in my entire life was when a friend brought a copy of Computer Shopper to school, and the cover proclaimed a new 90Mhz 486!! No other tech ever blew my mind like that again.
- galeos 6y agoLikewise - I remember someone walking into art class at school with a computer magazine featuring at 100mhz 486 DX4 on the cover. Triple figures!
- cogman10 6y agoI have to wonder if computer parts are less exciting now because of the lack of generational improvement or the fact that I'm an old fart that can't spend a bunch of time geeking out over the next generation. I really followed computer evolution during the GHz wars. Watching a CPU go from 300Mhz being fast to 2GHz being fast was amazing. Then watching as AMD pulled 1.8GHz parts and kicked the pants off of Intel's 2.5GHz parts was equally incredible to young me. Now I see generation to generation pushing 5->10% improvements and mostly go "meh".
- Shorel 6y agoDo you remember being able to run DooM and Winamp at the same time!?
- ant6n 6y agoUpgrading from 450 to 550? I once had an AMD Duron 650, which I overclocked very late in its life to 850MHz simply by increasing the FSB from 100MHz to 133Mhz (or so), no extra cooling or anything.
- xxs 6y agoLN2 is pretty standard for extreme overclocking. Requires a lot of preparation due to water condensation and some blow torch heating for the system to start up as it can fail to boot entirely. It's fairly simple and most pundits can do it at home if they so desire.
- lambdaba 6y agoThe biggest overclocking story of all time was when people discovered that (many/most?) 300Mhz Celerons where intentionally mislabeled 450Mhz ones, because apparently the yields where such that they couldn't not make mostly 450Mhz ones.
- rasz 6y agoThose werent miss-labeled, as there were never 450MHz Celerons. This overclockability was due to excellent 0.25um lithography process Intel was wielding at the time. Every Intel CPU had same MHz ceiling, even older laptop 200MHz Pentium 1 MMX Tillamook CPUs overclocked to over 400MHz https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqB4yCssUCM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqB4yCssUCM. This was also one of the reasons for Intel to start fighting with overclockers by locking multipliers.
- lambdaba 6y agoThanks for the correction, I remember indeed it was as you said, simply that they were capable of much higher frequencies. I didn't know that it was the case with other models, I guess I was mainly eyeing Celerons at that time because they were so cheap.
- cm2187 6y agoAlso reminds me of this old video (early 2000s) that shows what happens when you remove the heatsink. This is what cemented that image in my head of “AMD=cheap knockoff” that AMD reversed only 2-3 years ago (and now I am trying to source an EPYC Milan!). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYQSHXNFvUk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYQSHXNFvUk
- kalleboo 6y agoThis exact video had a big impact on my impressions of those companies as well, it's pretty amazing how long those views last.
- rasz 6y agoWhat you probably never saw was the non-retraction retraction Tomshardware had to publish later, and buried so deep even archive.org doesnt have access anymore. Yes, they manually excluded the link from wayback machine :o Here is the whole story: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/hot-spot,365-4.html https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/hot-spot,365-4.html somehow still accessible under its original 2001 link unlike most of their old material, wonder why :) >"AMD did not bless the Thunderbird core with ANY thermal protection whatsoever." In reality AMD socket certification required thermal cutout, same as Intel for Pentium 3. AMD processors do include thermal diode just like Intel ones. >"Intel's older processor is also equipped with a thermal diode and a thermal monitoring unit" is a lie. Pentium 3 thermal throttling is performed by the Bios just like in Athlon case. Serendipitously tomshardware picked broken Siemens motherboard for AMD system as recommended by Intel, imagine that. They published a non-retraction catching Siemens in a lie and showing proper AMD setup safely shutting down. Of course you cant read it because its buried down, excluded from wayback machine and deadlinked http://www.tomshardware.com/column/01q4/011029/index.html http://www.tomshardware.com/column/01q4/011029/index.html