Overclocking: Tom's Sets World Record

The impressive ventilation system will cool the chipset and MOSFETs on the motherboard (the components that manage the power supply).

3°C: The temperature drops again with liquid-nitrogen (also referred to as LN2) cooling.

The compressor can bring the temperature down to -41°C. The tests were run at that temperature, even though liquid nitrogen can bring it even lower.

Pouring nitrogen into the canister to cool the processor.

Tom’s Guide and Jmax-Hardware staff say “Cheese.”

It’s time for lunch, so the world overclocking record will just have to wait. The size of the order won brownie points with a well-known fast-food chain.

Liquid nitrogen is poured in to cool the processor. The record is ready to fall. The overclockers use liquid nitrogen to stabilize the temperature at around -125°C.

The motherboard used to break the record, a DFI DK-P35. We had five motherboards, purchased at Watercooling.fr. The company also gave us one card free of charge. At the end of the day, the motherboards were given to the members of the team that had come to set the new record.

The Record: 5,112 MHz with a Core 2 Quad Q6600 (2.4 GHz). That frequency was validated, but the team actually managed to attain 5,124 MHz (not validated).

In addition to the DFI motherboard and the Intel processor, the configuration had one 1 GB DIMM of DDR2 memory and a Geforce 8800 GTS 512 MB graphics card.

Update: As has been observed, the processor used in this test was a Core 2 Quad Q6600, with two of the cores disabled by the team in France. This configuration was used in order to hit the highest frequencies possible, rather than to yield a fast and usable system.

Please keep an eye out for more current overclocking coverage as we get ramp up our own international overclocking competition!

  • chechnyan
    ohh my god how he could do that in the picture 11
    its insane
    Reply
  • Acethechosenone
    Congrats Tom, a 5Ghz Q6600! Next step : Sponsorship from McDonald's ;)
    Reply
  • JohnnyMash
    Nice job of hitting 5+GHz! While it is usually customary to go into huge amounts of detail when reporting a LN2 'dyno run', there is very little information and a couple too many shots of beaming tech-heads and them eating at Macca's, and general uninformative detail in system photos. Given that this is a 'world record', it was quite unspectacular.

    Give the camera to that balding dude next time!
    Reply
  • outlw6669
    WTG Toms!
    That is a hell of an overclock!
    Reply
  • caskachan
    ok so how many more pages do i have to skim trough to know the actual record?
    Reply
  • fallen2004
    wow dats impressive, kinda a waste of time n money bt stil its fun
    Bt y use a P35 board wouldnt an X48 have been beter?
    Reply
  • lucuis
    Damn that's impressive. I wish it had any real world application though.
    Reply
  • 3Ball
    Very impressive guys. Grats!

    Best,

    3Ball
    Reply
  • randomizer
    So what was the record, highest Q6600 clockspeed?
    Reply
  • jaragon13
    holy ****.
    Reply