AMD aiming big in overclocking day

AMD overclocks with booze. No broads in sight.

What do you get if you mix 190 proof booze, liquid nitrogen, and overclockers? World records and a lot of smoke.

AMD is going for a bunch of overclocking records today, and it designed some interesting hardware to get it there. Of the bunch, by far the coolest things were the clear acrylic tubes filled with alcohol and liquid nitrogen. Why use a standard copper cylinder when you can make one that boils and smokes, and you can mix drinks in it when you are done?

Booze and CrossFire bridges. Party time.

Normally, overclockers use a copper or aluminum-copper cylinder instead of a heatsink on the CPU, and fill it with liquid nitrogen (LN2). The LN2 boils off cooling the CPU to sub-zero temps, and that allows it to run faster. Now, the nutballs are all going to liquid helium, and that requires different types of pots.

One of the side projects to come out of the helium transition was the clear acrylic pot, and it looks great. If you take an acrylic tube, mount it to a copper heat plate, and put that on the CPU, you get a nice tube that almost instantly turns to ice when you pour LN2 or helium in. To prevent this, you put a second tube around that, and fill it with ethanol as a thermal buffer. It looks like this.

Hot pots.

The fun begins when you pour LN2 into the middle tube, it starts violently boiling off, and cooling the CPU. The easiest and most common way to get near pure ethanol is go down to the local liquor shop in a bad neighborhood, and buy a bottle of Everclear. Pour it between the tubes, and it prevents the outer tube from icing over. Somewhat. Under full boil, it looks neat.

Booze and boiling.

As of this writing, Chew, the overclocker running the rig, had the CPUs down to -146C, and the record runs were just starting up. Once the Helium rig gets down to its running temperature, records are going to be falling, that is for sure.

In the end, what more do you want? Some 6+ GHz Phenom II 955 CPUs, overclocking records, liquid nitrogen, high end graphics cards, and 190 proof booze. That is how geeks really party.