Celeron overclocked to 8.1GHz

Whaddaya know? Intel's NetBurst isn’t completely useless!

Intel's Netburst might have become a retrospective embarrassment for the firm, but CPUs based on the best-forgotten architecture are apparently still hitting sky-high clock speeds.

This weekend, the extreme overclockers at Madshrimps managed to overclock an old 3.2GHz Celeron 352 all the way up to 8.1GHz, which is the second highest clock speed recorded in the HWBot CPU-Z rankings.

The result was achieved at an overclocking event at Belgian computer retailer Alternate, where Madshrimps was represented by two overclockers who call themselves Blind and Massman. It was the former who clocked the Celeron all the way up to 8,116MHz, with the help of a modded Asus P5B Premium motherboard and a pot of liquid nitrogen. The pot itself was made by liquid nitrogen cooling aficionado K|ngP|n, who is something of a legend among extreme overclockers.

However, according to the site, the chip still hit some impressive clock speeds using tamer cooling methods. Using standard air cooling, for example, the chip managed to hit 5.7GHz. Meanwhile, a more extreme cascade phase change cooler (where two or more refrigeration units are connected in series) enabled Blind to crank up the CPU's clock speed to 7GHz.

The headline-grabbing 8,116MHz result required some serious front side bus tweaking, as the chip's 24x multiplier was unchanged. As such, Blind had to push the front side bus speed from 133MHz (533MHz effective) to 338.17MHz (1,352.7MHz effective), while the CPU's voltage was increased from 1.3V to 1.9V to ensure that the CPU had enough power to handle the extra clock speed.

The Celeron 352 was based on Intel's Cedar Mill core, which represented NetBurst's last gasp before it was swallowed up by the superior Core architecture. Of course, why anyone would actually want a Celeron 352 overclocked to over 8GHz is anybody's guess, but it's still an impressive bit of willy waving for the guys who are only in it for the competition. If you're sceptical, you can see the CPU-Z validation of the result for yourself here.