Around 2 years ago, when the common Pentium 4 was around 2.6gHz, a group of overclocking fanatics attempted to break the world record for the fastest clock speed. Their goal was to successfully clock a Pentium 4 processor at 5 gHz. Back in the day, I was a hardcore overclocker (until I blew up my first computer, now I’m more of a moderate overclocker) and I wondered how someone would provide sufficient cooling for a clock speed that high. Their solution was liquid nitrogen.

(I don’t know about you, but I pressed mute around 2 seconds after I pressed play…)

As you can see, liquid nitrogen was enough to cool a Pentium 4 at ~5.3 gHz, breaking the world record at the time (I wonder if the system was still stable). I wish they benchmarked the PC so we could compare its performance to modern dual-core and quad-core processors. Nowadays, we’re finding ways to produce more power with less voltage (to reduce heat), so I’d like to see someone try to test the limits of today’s processors this way.