Australia, land of kangaroos and terrible actors, must be beaming today, what with the news that someone there was able to overclock an Intel Atom processor to 2.38GHz. That’s the fastest we’ve ever seen an Atom run, as a matter of fact.

Of course, getting the processor, found in an MSI Wind, to run that was quite the challenge, as it should be. Not since Frankenstein pieced together his monster did someone go to such lengths to accomplish anything.

What does running an Atom at 2.38GHz gain you, aside from bragging rights? Nothing, I would guess, which is about par for the course when it comes to overclocking. It’s the old Slashdot axiom, “Because you can.”

This is pretty cool. I’m all for tweaking your setup a little bit, but the guys at this Gigabyte-sponsored Championship in Taipei take it more seriously than I ever could. Maybe that’s because there was a $5000 prize at stake. Hmm…

The pictures are great if you’re a system builder: all cables and pipes and thermoses (thermi?) filled with liquid nitrogen. They had 11 full canisters for the participants to work their way through; now that’s a sign that this is a serious competition. There’s a lot to the story and if you’re an overclocker yourself, it’s definitely worth a look. For the record, a Finnish team called Sweden-2 took top honors but the Americans took home the “freestyle” prize. We tied with the Russkies for 2nd place overall, but they had a higher 3DMark score so they took the silver. Next time, Boris. Next time.

What a ridiculous project! But how awesome would it be to be the hardcore system building nerds they asked to do this? A couple months ago, a French Tom’s Hardware-related superteam got together to overclock an Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4GHz as far as it would go. They just put up the pictures and everything yesterday. They used liquid nitrogen cooling and a pretty serious-looking compressor to suck the heat right out of the thing, and ended up more than doubling the cycles. For reference, it’s generally safe to overclock your stock hardware about five percent, and even the real pros get maybe an extra thirty percent — and at that point you’re risking a lot of errors, artifacts, and so on. If you’ve ever wondered what liquid nitrogen cooling looks like in motion, check out the video (en Francais).

So congratulations to the team, but watch out for this guy (two years ago).

But at what cost?

This tool from ZDNet allows for super-easy overclocking of your Mac Pro. Until recently, overclocking has been one of the few remaining legs Windows users had up on Mac users, from an objective standpoint at least. The OC tools I’ve used on XP have ranged from the graphic to the obscure, and from the stable to the ridiculous. This ZDNet tool looks pretty simple, but being simple, it’s not really comprehensive. This is evident from the fact that multiple errors occur reliably while using the tool: the time gets messed up, it can’t restart without crashing past certain speeds, and the clockspeeds reset themselves when your machine goes to sleep — among other issues.
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It was just a matter of time before someone overclocked the hell out of one of these things. Thanks to a user named bdleonard over at the OLPC News Forum, you can really kick that 433MHz AMD Geode up a couple notches. One user was able to get his humming along at 566MHz, although he did report that the back of the screen got “noticeably warmer.”

Anyway, it’s not for the faint of heart and if you’re a small child reading this post from an OLPC, don’t try this without your parents’ permission. Although you’re reading CrunchGear, your parents probably mailed it in quite some time ago — maybe go get them a carton of smokes instead of relying on their overclocking judgment.

How to overclock your OLPC [OLPC News Forums]

NVIDIA Says No to G80 Overclocking? [I4U via The Inquirer]

Vigor Gaming Updates Its Peltier-on-a-Chip Cooler [ExtremeTech]

Vigor Gaming Monsoon II [Product page]