Guest post by In a recent video, several hard core overclockers had a heyday just after CES lugging in the liquid nitrogen and liquid helium to provide themselves with enough coolant to perform such a feat– and all for the public eye to see, no less. At nearly absolute zero temperatures of -232 degrees Celsius, these speed demons pushed their Phenom II X4s right into the record books, achieving a staggering clock of 6.5 GHz, not to mention shattering the hopes and dreams of thousands by stealing the 3DMark05 crown with 45,474 points. As a side note, liquid nitrogen is a bit tough to come by in most societies, so you may want to stifle that overclocking beast that has risen within you and keep your chips nice and un-fried as they were designed to be.
Post price-cuts the Phenom II is amazing from a price/performance perspective.
I could have a super computer AND replace my rattling boiler all in one go 😀
liquid nitrogen is a bit tough to come by in most societies
Nitrogen? Thats easy… Have you tried Helium?? It is extremely hard to handle, not easy like nitrogen…
Ok Ok I stop my geekness 
Polypedilum vanderplanki is the only known life form that can survive in liquid helium at temperatures as low as 3 degrees Kelvin.
Wow, off-topic but still crazy!
And in the meantime the average temperature of the world has just gone up by a few degrees.
At this point, I could give a damn about CPU speed as I now care more about how cool the CPU runs as opposed to it’s speed. It has gone beyond almost acceptable in my opinion how hot CPUs run these days. In the huge rush to get the fastest little clicks per second they have opened a pandora’s box of heat related issues. I simply can not help but notice how quickly components are dying these days due to overheating as opposed to the good old days of 400-700mhz CPUs.
Why 6.5Ghz may be impressive to a minor degree, what would really impress me is the headline of a CPU running at a certain lower temp.
p.s. My latest duo-Core laptop lasted just over a year, before the GPU fried out due to what I am almost assured was overheating. This is just the latest in a growing number of machines I have seen simply burn out. Yet all my old firewalls, NAS, etc.. running on older processors just keep going quietly and cool.
Yeah, and also the video cards… like I was reading that you had to perform some kind of hack for the ATI 4870 cards in order to make the stock fans go faster so that they’d actually cool the card properly. That’s just madness.
Gives cold boot a whole new meaning, right?