Our first Dry Ice sesion - E6700 @ 4740Mhz

[Monstru]

A few weeks ago, me and my friend Matose were trying to get something out of some Connies on air, while having +46/48 degrees Celsius ambient temperature. I became obvious pretty fast that we needed something else, so we went to our gurus (M1cutzu, Sang and Xwoodoo) asking for some help. M1 suggested that we should try some Dry Ice action, to get used with sub-zero benching. Said and done.... M1 and Sang provided us with the dice pot (full Alu, nothing fancy) and with lots of useful advices, tips and tricks, things that would have taken us days to dig out from all the related threads here at XS. On the other hand, Xwoodoo provided us with reliable Ram (Mushkin Redline XP2-8000), with a strong PSU (Mushkin HP-580AP) and an air conditioned location. Sang gave us the insulation and lots of advice, that we really found useful during benching. So, having full support from "the big guys" here at CrazyPc, we started gathering everything that we needed to start the action.

The Platform:

Motherboard: Dfi Infinity P965 , SilenX NB cooler, no mods.
DDR: Mushkin Redline XP2-8000
PSU: Mushkin HP-580AP
Video: Ati 3D Rage PCI
HDD: 40Gb Sata 2Mb Buffer


CPU's

Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 (FPO L627B)
Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 (FPO L639A)
Celeron D346 (Prescott Core)

We used nail polish to insulate around the socket and on the back of the mobo. We also use armaflex for the insulation.

Obviously, first time we tried to start the mobo after we had mounted the pot...it wouldn't start. We lowered the pressure from the top plate, and we heard that sweet sweet sound that every overlocker loves to hear after pushing it to much: "beep"...the mobo works.

E6700 - This one was very hot, and our Alu tube was pretty thin, so we couldn't get it higher that 4740Mhz (Spi Stable), vcore 1,71v, @ -52C. Still, we consider this to be an ok result for starters, with a CPU that doesn't go higher than 5,1 on LN2... Result: 10.687s

E6600 - The minimum temperature that we got was -62C on this one. Thsi is a really fabulous CPU, as it did 500x9 with 1.63 without any problems. We had really high hopes with this one, unfortunately we hit a FSB wall at 505Mhz, which we couldn't get over even with 1,8v on the core. Still, at 4500Mhz - 1,63v @ -62C it is a very stable and cold E6600.

The last candidate was a Prescott core Celeron D346 (3.06Ghz, 522FSB, 256Kb L2 cache, 90nm). We got into windows at 4920 a few times, but when we started to tweak the Super Pi Score we couldn't get it to go higher than 4,83. We were impressed with this little chip, even though we wished we had an 65nm Cedar Mill core with 512kB L2 Result : 31.938s

In the end, on behalf of M1cutzu, we played with X6800 + EVGA 8800GTX, but this was the hottest CPU I have ever seen, so it really lacked the appetite for glory (at least under Dry Ice), hitting only 4100Mhz 3DMark 2001 stable. So we just had a run of 3DMark 2001, just to finish the Dry Ice, and we hit a modest score: 73682 points. Well, it's small, but it is ours

In the end we would like to thank again to M1cutzu, Sang and Xwoodoo for all the help they gave us, we really couldn't do it without them. We would laso like to thank Iubitel, he was there with us all the time, giving a helping hand.

We have learned a lot from this first Dry Ice session, the temperatures and clocks we played with really opened us an appetite for this type of benching, which we will repeat again really soon . On the other hand, we learned from the support we got from the big guys what it means to really be involved in the development of the enthusiast community here.

I will leave you with some pics now