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As a benchmarker, the biggest milestone you will come across is your first plunge below -100C. Liquid Nitrogen is -196C by nature, and to utilize this exotic cooling material, you need a fantastic evaporator, or more commonly known as a pot. Much like dry ice, cooling the processor down this cold will decrease impedance that opposes electron flow. This allows for a more efficient circuit, promoting greater stability and overclocking headroom.

After 2 years of research, waiting, gathering hardware, blogging, and toying with dry ice, I have now crossed the line into the “big league” of extreme cooling. Liquid Nitrogen. I was originally inspired after I had the privilege of visiting an extreme overclocking event in Austin, Texas at the AMD Lonestar Campus Headquarters exactly 2 years ago to the day. I got to watch some of the best of the best overclockers such as Kingpin, Chew* and Gomeler work their magic with LN2. I wrote an article about it here.

This event also spawned a video: Xtreme Conditions ( I am in the black v-neck standing next to Chew*)

Without further ado, here comes my first Liquid Nitrogen run: inspired by overclockers, performed by overclockers.

I come equipped bearing:
-one 30L Union Carbide Laboratory Grade Dewar
-one LN2cooling.com Evaporator, one Phenom II X6 1090T BE
-one set of Mushkin Ridgeback 4GB PC3-12800
-one Gigabyte 890FXA-UD5
-one PC Power & Cooling 750 Watt “Silencer”
- two Scythe 120mm Variable CFM Fans
-one Sapphire Radeon HD 5870 1GB
-one container of dielectric grease
-one container of “no-leak” plumbing putty
-lots of neoprene bits
-and a roll of paper towel.

Board preparation and insulation was extremely similar to my DICE run preparation, which is why I have taken no pictures of this particular step this time around. However, I will post pictures from my previous prep. The only difference is I added a small amount of neoprene bits in areas where I ran out of putty.

Grease applied around the socket. The last line of defense against moisture and condensation.

Putty around the socket.

Before I post the results I just want to send out a big thanks to my benching partner Addies, as he helped find the great deal to purchase this dewar, as well as helping pitch for liquid nitrogen, helping me film, and helping me reach some great overclocking results. And I would also like to thank Aaron Schradin of LN2cooling.com for lending me this great evaporator.LN2cooling.com Evaporator

Union Carbide LD-30 30L Laboratory Grade Dewar

I was very proud of how my 890FXA-UD5 held up, as it’s already been through 3 DICE runs (Dry Ice Inception, Second Frost, and Deep Freeze). I had no condensation issues, as I used dielectric grease then layered on plumbers putty and neoprene. The LN2cooling.com pot did extremely well.

Addies and I managed to produce some decent results. Nothing special by any means, but for a first run we’re proud of the results.

Click Here For Video –

|Liquid Heaven| – |1090T X6 & 555 X2 Under Liquid

Nitrogen| – |6.6GHz+|

Anyways, enough text, time for some result screenshots. We tested Sandra as part of a competition.

6.625GHz Valid – 14th Place 1090T

Validation

10.578s SuperPi 1M – 8th Place 1090T

11m 19. 282s SuperPi 32M – 6th Place 1090T

Sandra Memory Latency – 46.2ns

Sandra Memory Bandwidth – 22.68GB/s

Thats it for results folks. My next run will include higher valids, Pifast, wPrime, and I will also bench my X4 555 BE which fully unlocks and is a better clocker than my X4 955 and X6 1090T.