Tweaking the TWKR: LN2 Review - PAGE 1

Back in my previous article, when I took a look at the Phenom II TWKR, I did not have a dewar to transport the liquid nitrogen so I was limited to using dry ice. Even though I had many hours of fun with it, I could not achieve results as good as the others did, since I could not cool the processor low enough. Not only that, but I could not exhibit the true power of the AMD Phenom II TWKR Edition.

Recently, I got an excellent deal on used extreme cooling equipment - including a dewar. I said in my first TWKR article that I would write a little update when it was possible for us to test the TWKR under LN2, so here we are. With 20L of liquid nitrogen we settled down to overclock that little processor sitting in a black aluminum box.

We used our trustfully Gigabyte MA790FXT-UD5P that's being part of our standard AMD test platform. Our somewhat lowly GTX 260 Core 216 also took place in the rig. We did not focus on gaming benchmarks anyway.

Once we got the rig insulated and running, we began to pour the LN2 into the pot. Quickly, we discovered that the amount of insulation I was normally using for dry ice was not enough for a coolant as cold as -196C. Some solid condensation formed all other the motherboard and the pot. The most impressive was the ice in the two first memory slots. Installing the DIMMs in the fartest slots was a good idea it seems.

Luckily, the MA790FXT-UD5P didn't mind and continued to run as strong as ever. So what could we achieve with such an icy setup? Follow me on to the next page!