AMD Phenom II X4 955 LHe Overclocking Event

Three Days and Three Overclockers

Last week AMD organized a small overclocking event for a group of overclockers from North America. Hosted at AMD’s facility in Austin, Texas, the event was arranged to match competitive overclockers with the best silicon coming out of AMD’s fabs in hopes of breaking some records and possibly hitting 7GHz. To push everything over the edge, AMD arranged for 300 liters of liquid helium and had prepared a liquid helium pot with the help of Aaron Schradin of Immersi Solutions.

AMD invited three overclockers, Vince Lucido aka K|ngp|n, Brian McLachlan aka chew*, and Chris Morrell, aka Gomeler. On hand to answer questions and make sure things went smoothly were Peter Hardman and Simon Solotko of AMD. The overclocking went from Wednesday through Friday night with necessary breaks taken to keep the benchers for passing out on their feet.

Below is an image of the internals of the LHe pot made especially for this purpose. Previous LHe pots simply blasted LHe at the base of a traditional LN2 pot and were incredibly inefficient.

This special LHe pot features a cap that forces the LHe to remain in contact with the copper for as long as possible, boosting efficiency and cooling capacity. Seeing how LHe costs $5/liter, we were literally evaporating away money, so any boost in efficiency was helpful.