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!