Liquid helium trumps liquid nitrogen at AMD's Phenom II overclocking love-in
By Tim Stevens 
posted May 28th 2009 10:38AM
posted May 28th 2009 10:38AM
posted May 28th 2009 10:38AM
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Call Al Gore!
^ I see it differently. With trial and error, people will eventually develop some revolutionary products. Look at Formula 1 race for example, it brought many invention benefiting vehicles on the road today.
More like call all the scientists in the world. There has been a shortage of LN2 recently and turns out its these dbags wasting it on this.
wtf? i thought liquid nitrogen was cheaper than milk..
"at the expense of Earth's natural resources"
Yea... call Al Gore and tell him Engadget doesn't want any body wasting the second most abundant element IN THE UNIVERSE! Surely not enough of that to go around. And quit breathing up all that Nitrogen! Can't believe these guys are wasting what is almost 80% of the air.
Helium is rare though. Let's burn AMD down!
Al Gore is too busy trying to find Manbearpig to worry about a little bit of helium.
Try this google search "define: sarcasm" and you might understand my original comment.
Al Gore: Profiting from scaring people about a non-existing problem since 2000!
My thoughts exactly. It's nice to see some people have pulled their heads out of their rectal orifices.
LOL
It's not like it would be hard to trap the helium after it evaporated...
I'm not an environmentalist by any means (Al Gore is an idiot), but liquid helium is actually a rapidly disappearing resource that is becoming more and more expensive to use in legitimate scientific research. Wasting it on ridiculous overclocking speeds that have absolutely no application to real life does seem like a sad waste.
Liquid Hydrogen?
Ka-BANG!
Time to over clock my Zune!
I know... time for 192KHz up sampling with 24bit resolution!
in the end, all matter on this globe originates from natural resources. oh and, the air contains around 80% nitrogen... meh.
I think they were referring to the helium, which has built up in the Earth as a radioactive decay product and is constantly escaping into space.
This is just pathetic, instead of putting out cpu's with competitive real world power they're just doing these marketing stunts to impress some kiddies, way to go AMD!
have you ever heard of "fun"? you should try it.
@ultimatepwnage
fun? thats been outlawed by seciton C of article 2591 of chapter XII of book 9 of volume 3 of the 12th revision of the Intel x86 instruction set
Where's that damn "i R srz" cat at when you need him?
Ze concept of 'fun' iz a wee bit difficult to grasp for people who are born, in countries wiz try teach their kids to be busy little robots.
Overclocking an expensive CPU to the brink of destruction is not my idea of fun either. I'm having enough fun with my air cooled i7 thank you very much.
you have an i7 and say the Phenom II X4 955 is expensive? do you live in Assbackwardville? goddamn i hate fanboys
Actually with i7 prices having come down a lot (at least on the 920) the price/performance ratio of i7 is better than the Phenom II 955 if you plan on overclocking. Microcenter has had the 920 retail box for $199 several times (and it's $229 today if you don't wanna wait for another sale). Mother prices have come down a lot too so while an i7 is still going to cost more than a Phenom II, if you overclock both the i7 computer will be so much faster that it's difficult to say that the Phenom II is a better value.
Since this a post about overclocking stock performance is largely irrelevant, but even at stock speeds the 955 doesn't do great against any i7.
"In these tough economic times it's good to see that one company at least is still willing to take things to great excesses at the expense of Earth's natural resources."
OHH.. BAM!! Nice left hook, sir! Well done.
Uh, Liquid Nitrogen/Helium is not a natural resource. Just a frozen form of 2 naturally occurring gases. So by using it up, they actually returned it to its natural state, replenishing the source. Not that its hard to find in the first place.
This doesn't include the huge amounts of energy wasted converting it to liquid form.
Nitrogen and Helium are naturally occurring in the air and are reproduced every day. All they did was condense it bottle it and freeze it. By utilizing in this manor they simply allowed it to return to its Gas state. Waste I don't think so.
Tarnation, You can't condense helium out of the atmosphere. It's light enough that it escapes out into space, and has no appreciable concentration in the lower atmosphere. The liquid helium used in the US is pumped out with natural gas where it's trapped and purified.
Helium is found at approximately 5ppm in the atmosphere, which is quite rare. You can make some out of the air, however this is much more expensive that obtaining from natural gas sites. Nitrogen is obviously easily obtainable from the environment. Other than energy lost, there is no harm in releasing either gas into the environment. However, given the rarity of the helium and expense in creating it, most folks would have a re-circulator that captures and reliquifies the gas (for instance like a MRI machine or the LHC); not sure why they seem to have built a chimney with a giant plume of expensive gas shooting out of it (it's not exactly hard to capture)...
Really? You guys are going argue about converting an element from one state to another in an Engadget thread?
Can't we all just get along?
A 240 liter liquid nitrogen runs me about $189 with delivery fees. And it's not really a waste. They pump it out of the atmosphere and sell it to you. When it boils off, it returns to the atmosphere so they can pump it out again and resell it. What a racket! VERY low material costs on their end--wish I had thought of this money maker. I don't know if I would attribute the speed increase to the slightly lower temp. Both are pretty close to absolute zero, if there's such a thing as 'close enough' when you experiment in that region. The slight gain in less resistance may not account for all of it.
You guys better just stop now. I mean, think of the resources you had to waste to get the energy to type these needless replies. First you had to eat something, then you had to breathe - releasing CO2 (gasp!). Then you had to expend that energy. I, personally, am disgusted at the gross display of the destruction of our natural resources. Shame on you.
"Both are pretty close to absolute zero, if there's such a thing as 'close enough' when you experiment in that region."
Liquid Nitrogen forms at 77K which isn't 'pretty close to absolute zero'.
Liquid Helium, however, forms below 5K, which certainly is 'pretty close to absolute zero'!
Actually, there's a rather large difference. Heat transfer is directly related to temperature difference. Given that liquid nitrogen is about 77K and liquid helium is about 4K, whereas room temperature is about 300K, that's a solid 30% difference.
lol at first I thought someone had build a rocket into there computer. 6.89GHz that's pretty sweet!
And yes it can play Crysis cuz I know someone is going to say it.
yes but THIS beast can play crysis on utra-high WITHOUT a gpu... just use some cores to virtualize a graphics card :P
but will it blend?
Uh, Liquid Nitrogen/Helium is not a natural resource. Just a frozen form of 2 naturally occurring gases. So by using it up, they actually returned it to its natural state, replenishing the source. Not that its hard to find in the first place.
This doesn't include the huge amounts of energy wasted converting it to liquid form.
Actually, helium is a limited resource... It is so light that the gas actually escapes earth's gravity, and thus, the atmosphere.
DId you miss the part where Helium is the most common element?
Hydrogen is the most common element, bound in a compound known as H20. Helium not so much.
Helium is the 2nd most abundant element in the universe, but it is quite rare on earth. On earth, it comes from natural gas, as well as radioactive decay. After that, it escapes the earth's gravitational pull because it is so light.
Perhaps they should include the disclaimer: "No Helium or Nitrogen was created or destroyed in the making of this demonstration".
Good to know they didn't use any nuclear reactors then...
How dare they! Don't they know that Hydrogen & Helium are both green house gasses. As is Oxygen, Argon, and Cobalt. How much longer will Mother Nature® allow us to rape her?
As long as she keeps letting us slip her mickeys.
Giggity
Thats ridiculous and awesome.
Our precious natural liquid Nitrogen and liquid Hydrogen resources?