Driver Heaven is a website for enthusiasts. Being an enthusiast is more than having the newest technology. It’s about understanding, loving, and overclocking the hell out of the newest technology. And overclocking is more than just a word, it’s a culture. A culture of extremes, bragging rights, and world records. A culture that has become so influential it has caused significant changes in the market for almost every manufacturer. CPU, GPU, Memory, Motherboards, PSUs, all at the will, whim, and abuse of the overclockers. Two companies in particular who have recently made amazing strides for overclockers have been Intel and Abit.

The Details

Intel has come full force in taking over the overclocking scene, putting AMD in the backburners and causing AMD users to be well… “green” with envy. The release of their Conroe series has shown amazing results with low heat and power consumption. Their newest release of the Kentsfield (Quad Core) CPU has again topped the benchmarks and has caused overclocking delight.

Universal Abit has come from wobbly ground to “reclaim” the market. Not long ago they were fighting a battle of QC issues and financial woes. But their acquisition by USI has help put them on solid ground. Since their acquisition they have been working more closely with the scene and have been improving quality and implementing new technologies onto their boards to satisfy overclockers and normal users alike. Their newest release, the AW9D-Max has not only been featured on Driver Heaven, but has been making lots of noise in the overclocking scene.

So it is no surprise that these two companies held a private overclocking event on Friday December 15, 2006 to push the Kentsfield and the AW9D-Max to the extreme with the help of some of the biggest names in overclocking. So what happens when you get a retail Kentsfield, an AW9-D Max (modded hipro5 from Xtreme Systems style), a three stage cascade system, and a big container of ln2 (liquid Nitrogen) in a room alone with Charles “Fugger” and Don “Philly-boy” from Xtremesystems? Driver Heaven has the answer.

The Event

Right from the beginning things weren’t going as planned. Abit had sent a board directly to hipro5 to be modded and this was the board to be overclocked at the event. Unfortunately hipro5’s voltage mod had unknowingly been broken off during shipping back to Abit (and had to be re-added to get more voltage, and failed at a point later). And the day before the event, another mod touched the Zalman heatsink during the initial testing at Abit and the board was fried. So a copy cat modded board was made for Charles and Philly-boy. The nitrogen was also nowhere to be seen, so we started off with the phase change solution.

First thing first, a peek at the soon to be abused modded board and CPU.

From there Charles and Philly set up Charles’s personal three stage cascade and finish building the system. The initial overclocking begins and all goes as planned until the circuit blows a few times. They get up and running again and Charles starts pushing, however the Kentsfield hits a wall very quickly. The chip is running about 120 below zero and it’s running too hot, where is that Nitrogen!?

It’s now past 10 am and the nitrogen finally arrives in a tank bigger than me. We disassemble and move the cascade setup to make room for the real fun the cascade. Now in order to get the nitrogen into a liquid state, Charles and Philly-boy have to release the pressure inside the tank because it’s gassier than an all you can eat bean restaurant. When the pressure is right, Charles rigs a direct feed nitrogen cooling solution and the party starts.

So at the end of an extreme overclocking day, what was killed and what was accomplished? A 1000 watt PSU was killed, Abit’s servers went down a few times, and we were worried that the AW9D was going to fry because of the condensation but it survived and prevailed.

Accomplishments were a 10.562 Super Pi which isn’t a record breaker, but getting the Kentsfield running at 5.010ghz with all four cores on normal voltage is a new world record. If the voltage mod had survived, we are all sure the Kentsfield could have pushed so much more. And while the overclocking achievements may be considered somewhat limited, there were some other great triumphs. Intel and Abit showed their commitment to the overclockers and their culture. Xtreme Systems and Driver Heaven proved their desire to be at the cutting edge of the overclocking scene. And Abit learned the post code for “Too cold to boot.”

In closing, we would like to thank Charles and Don for their hard work during the event as well as Abit and Intel for recognizing Driver Heaven as a leader in the enthusiast world.