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.

You take the blue pill and it’s over, you wake up tomorrow and continue life as you know it and you believe what you want to believe.

You take the Green pill and I show you a world you never could have imagined in your wildest dreams where limits and boundaries are meant to be broken.

I obviously chose the Green pill

I will save the long drawn out speech for after the results…..So lets get right to the results….

I would like to state that in no way did I push this CPU to the limits in 2D….I had tuned my hardware for 100% efficiency prior to the trip to Austin.  I don’t use software tweaks, its not my thing and quite honestly I really don’t need them as I’m a firm believer that hardware tuning is greater than any software tuning can be.

System Configuration:

Gigabyte 790FXT-UD5P

AMD ??? CPU

PC P&C 1200W Turbo Cool + 750 Silencer

2×1GB Micron D9 GTR

2×2GB OCZ Animals

2 x Radeon HD 4890’s (3D)

Radeon HD 2600 Pro (2D)

Prototype Kingpin Pot

Prototype Phantom Pot by Aaron  Schradin

As always with me, I do not validate single cores, this is a 4 core validation also denoting I could have benched higher had I chosen to.

I ran some 3D with my 2×1GB set.

Not happy with the result and knowing I could squeeze a few more points out, I swapped to my OCZ 2×2GB sticks which I prefer for benching 3D.

All in all I had a great time and would like to take a moment to thank some people.

Special thanks goes out to Simon Solotko for being a believer.

Special thanks goes out to Vince AKA K|ngp|n.  It was an honor to bench next to you and an honor to use your prototype pot

This thing is a beast and is going to make benching LN2 so much more relaxing

Special thanks goes out to Aaron Shradin for letting me test the prototype acrylic see through LN2 pot.

I think this is the first piece of hardware I have ever used that looks cool and works 100%.

I also think this may be one of the best pots ever made in the pound for pound category….holding at -190 no load and -189.8 loaded.

Special thanks goes out to the rest of the AMD crew who was more than hospitable and helped to make this event possible right down to the engineers.

It was an honor to get invited and I truly hope I did not disappoint.

For those who may ever get a chance like this themselves, the best advice I can give you is to seize the moment and own it as this opportunity truly only comes once in a lifetime…