First Overclocked Sandy Bridge Systems Available

 The Trinity Plutonium is shown above with the GIGABYTE P67A-UD7 motherboard.



Intel's still-as-of-yet-unreleased "Sandy Bridge" chip has been generating a fair amount of buzz across internet discussion boards. Just visit Tom's Hardware, or Xtreme Systems and you won't have to look very far to see several topics on overclocking Sandy Bridge chips, or how to overclock a Sandy Bridge, or any number of discussions on how different it is to overclock the Sandy Bridge architecture.

Those who have done their fair share of overclocking via FSB/QPI acceleration and multiplier tweaking know that the best way to gain performance is to tune up your Frontside Bus (or QPI) as much as possible, and have the multiplier operate on that. The reason is that the Fronside Bus gains have a positive spillover effect to the subsystems attached to it (RAM for one), so throttling that puppy alleviates other potential bottlenecks elsewhere.

It was a big surprise to some of us to learn that the new Sandy Bridge architecture went in roughly the exact opposite direction! The FSB has slowed down to 100 MHz to allow for Intel's new design strategy of having "multiple multipliers" to deliver the functional speed of the associated subsytem. For their stock 3.4 GHz, the multiplier is set to 34. We've seen announcements that the new cooler operation (thermodynamically speaking) of the Sandy Bridge allows for reaching 4.9 GHz on air-cooling alone. Think of what a finely-tuned water-cooled or vapor phase change unit could deliver.

Screech. Hold on a second. What about that Intel Press Release about not getting the speed too much faster than that? Intel is claiming the "old school" thinking about "colder = faster" does not scale linearly with this new architecture. Hitting 4.9 GHz on air does not mean 5.5 GHz on chilled water is going to happen, which is a perfectly normal consideration on the pre-Sandy Bridge product lines.

Googling around, you see a common sentiment. All of the 4.9 GHz hype seems to be for short-run computations. In fact, there are only two active players in the market right now who are making any kind of remarks about long-term overclocking stability when applied to the Sandy Bridge.

Liquid Nitrogen Overclocking and GIGABYTE are the two companies who seemed to have outfoxed the rest of the industry gathering around the Sandy Bridge. Of course GIGABYTE released an entire series of motherboards to work with the Intel Sandy Bridge chips. Take a look at this expansive product launch from GIGABYTE:

The GIGABYTE 6 Series P67A-UD7 was the flagship choice for Liquid Nitrogen Overclocking when they built their Trinity Plutonium product line. Using this amazing GIGABYTE motherboard, they throttled their Intel Sandy Bridge i7-2600K chip up to 4.5 GHz for 24x7 computation at full load across all 4 cores/8 threads. That's right, no "caveats", no stipulations for using that clock speed for short periods of time --- if you want to beat on your system and run 24 hour torture tests for days, weeks, or months, Liquid Nitrogen Overclocking said "fine by us." This shows that Liquid Nitrogen Overclocking has incredible confidence in the GIGABYTE P67A-UD7, offering an 18-month warranty for all parts and labor on the Trinity Plutonium product line.

But how fast in an overclocked Sandy Bridge i7-2600K when compared to, say, the Intel Gulftown? According to Liquid Nitrogen Overclocking, 1.0 GHz of i7-2600K works out to 1.1 GHz of Gulftown for non-floating point benchmarking trials, and floating point is even better than this due to the architecture improvements in the Sandy Bridge. This would indicate that the overclocked Sandy Bridge i7-2600K @ 4.5 GHz on Liquid Nitrogen Overclocking's Trinity Plutonium model would be about the same performance as a 4.95 GHz Intel Gulftown, and we all know how fast the Gulftown is!

Wow! That's incredible performance, considering you can run that 24x7 while stressing all cores and threads to the max.

GIGABYTE also offers the following in the 6 series motherboard lineup:

The H67A-UD3H, H67M-D2, H67MA-D2H, H67MA-UD2H, P67A-UD3, P67A-UD3P, P67A-UD3R, P67A-UD4, P67A-UD5, (we already mentioned the P67A-UD7), the PH67-UD3 and the PH67A-UD3.

In building their Trinity Stealth model, a smaller version of the Plutonium, Liquid Nitrogen Overclocking selected GIGABYTE's  H67MA-UDH2 motherboard and the Intel i5-2500K chip. Overclocking this chip to 4.2 GHz for 24x7 operation was in line with their pricing strategy, to offer a low-cost 4.2 GHz system to a wider audience. It's amazing that you can get a 4.2 GHz system that delivers the same speed as a 4.6 GHz Intel Gulftown for less money than a fully-stocked 3.33 GHz machine.

We expect Liquid Nitrogen Overclocking and GIGABYTE will do well with their new strategy.

All the internet buzz over the 5.0 GHz Gulftown by Liquid Nitrogen Overclocking

Originally, I wanted to save this for a later post, but after receiving a half a dozen emails about it from different folks, I had to move fast before somebody else broke the story!

The Intel Gulftown is truly remarkable out of the box, without any overclocking. All six cores banging out 3.33 GHz on that Westmere micro-architecture, able to run up to 12 threads in parallel, is really something beautiful to behold. Benchmarkers soon discovered that the 32 nanometer CMOS semiconductor, in conjunction with all of the other improvements, meant that GHz per GHz, the Gulftown was 50% faster than a quad core Bloomfield (the i7-975).

Whoah! So a 3.33 GHz Gulftown was like a 4.995 GHz (oh, hell, call it a 5.0 GHz system, would ya?) i7-975?

Yes, we were salivating over that news.

But gains in the computer industry have been creeping along. We first broke 3.0 GHz back in 2002. Now, architectures have made considerable gains since then, and more cores have been added as the years have gone on, but for the most part, the clock frequency has hit a thermodynamic brick wall of sorts.


Here it is 8 years later, and we are still all "ooooooh, aaaaaaah" over a 3.33 GHz processor called the Intel Gulftown.

So, as many of us daydream, we type different "dream speeds" (more correctly, frequencies) into the Google search engine. And what does Google do for us? Google finds references to them, but.... how?

I tried my hand at "5.0 GHz Gulftown" and lo and behold, there were SEVERAL places already raving about a company called Liquid Nitrogen Overclocking.

OK, I had to blink. I know what overclocking is, and how Liquid Nitrogen is used to build some benchtop "rigs" that look like they'd never fit into a case of any dimension. Did someone hookup a Liquid Nitrogen cooling solution to an Intel Gulftown to produce the 5.0 GHz system everyone was talking about?

 It turns out: No! But they did build a 5.0 GHz Intel Gulftown with just a "normal" cooling solution that just about everybody could use! That is what all the buzz was about!

Time to visit http://www.LiquidNitrogenOverclocking.com and see what was going on. After a dozen phone calls, I finally reach someone named Ed Trice. It turns out that Ed is calling the shots over at L.N.O., and he and Chief Technical Officer William Harmon, known the world over as "Buckeye" in the overclocking domain, have figured out what nobody else in the world has: How to fit a cooling solution to overclock a 5.0 GHz Gulftown into one box.

My interview with Ed Trice was very enjoyable. We talked about almost everything, and I do mean everything. No matter how the conversation veered, he always came back to Buckeye's "Trinity Lightning" model, what Bill named their creation. The 5.0 GHz Trinity Lightning evolved out of a few "simple questions" Ed asked Bill. Bill would tell Ed why it was not possible, nor feasible, to do "X-Y-Z", the thing that Ed postulated about as a means to make computers faster. Ed would grow silent, and then throw another brainstorming idea at Bill.

"Most of the time, Bill was amused at my relatively absurd ideas," Ed would say "But with each new suggestion, he would chuckle less, and say something like '...ummm...' more and more. Eventually we had something that was worth exploring."

Ed fully credits Bill when it comes to the Trinity Lightning. "All I did was brainstorm and toss out crazy ideas, Bill really took it the rest of the way and delivered the goods. This is his design, and he should get all of the credit for it."

No matter how it came about, it really is a modern marvel. The machine gurgles a bit as it first starts up, then it churns and you can hear something is going on inside. Nothing on the monitor yet. And then, it starts to life.

"The core temperature must reach -40 or else it won't power on the computer," Ed Trice says, then he smiles when I ask him "Is that Fahrenheit or Celsius?"

He nods and says "Yes!" and breaks into a laugh. He explains: "That is the only temperature where degrees Fahrenheit equals degrees Celsius," and indeed, he is correct.

On with the demonstration. I had to see this thing crank first hand. First, a gander at CPU-z confirms this unit is running at 5002 MHz = just over 5.0 GHz. Wow. I beam from ear to ear with a huge smile on my face.

I am then shown benchmark run after benchmark run, SuperPi, Prime95, some whetstones, even one of Ed's checkers programs running so fast you can't read what is on the console window.

Much of what happens I can't report on, because I am so awestruck at what I am seeing, my pen refused to take notes. Here it was, right in front of me, a 5.0 GHz Intel Gulftown, crushing computation after computation, not dropping to below a frigid -30 Fahrenheit the whole time.

For those who are interested, click this link to visit their website and check it out for yourself. I heartily recommend the 5.0 GHz Trinity Lightning to all of those who need incredibly fast computing speed, and proven stability!

Overclocked Computer Reviews Launches!

Greetings to all of the first-time readers out there, and welcome to the blog.

Here you will find reviews of custom overclocked rigs, performance ratings and benchmark results, and overclocked systems that are for sale.

Our objective is to comb the internet, the discussion boards, and navigate away from all of the "How To" mayhem and technobabble, and just provide reviews of stable hardware that can be used every day. No "bench rigs", no disembodied systems with fans blowing or dry ice being dropped in buckets, just fully assembled rigs that you can buy if you want to, or just gawk at if you can't!