A Summer Road Trip With the Intel Core i7 975 EE

Did we ever book it out of Air Cooling Canyon quickly and for good reason; when the next stop on the map is -35C, how can an overclocker resist? The answer, he/she can't...yeah, there are some female geeks out there clocking too guys, you just scare them all away in the forums the second you find out they are female. Learn to play it cool and more ladies might show their face in our sausage party of a community.

Now, Phase Change City, where idle temps are as cold as a northern Manitoba winter...in May maybe. When going below ambient temperature, like humans, computers need insulation. For that, we turn to the latest craze to hit the sub-zero scene, kneaded rubber eraser. The only problem is that the art store introverts look at you weird when you walk in and ask for a couple boxes of the stuff, trust me, I know.

Just like 1/2" neoprene did before it, kneaded rubber eraser insulates the surface of the motherboard around the CPU to prevent from condensation forming on the surface. In case you didn't know, puddles of water and motherboards don't mix while water in the socket is another sure fire way to kill something. The kneaded rubber eraser prevents any air from touching the surface of the motherboard around the socket which will get cold when we put sub-zero cooling on the processor. By preventing air from touching the cold surface of the motherboard, water won't condense and we prevent puddles. With the Classified's winter coat on and ready for the colder temps here in Phase Change City, it is time to mount the evaporator...that's the cold part of a phase change cooler.

A couple layers of armacell sheets go between the hold down and the kneaded rubber eraser and we are officially insulated, ready for sub-ambient cooling. You will notice the switch to the EVGA X58 3X SLI Classified motherboard as we want only the best hardware involved when really pushing this processor. Nothing right now can touch the Classified when it comes to CPU clocks.

In the second photo above we are showing the massive power of an ATI Rage64 PCI video card in use. This is my typical SPi setup so we figured it deserved a little air time. Also note the temperature on the probe. This is about as good as it gets with this phase change as it desperately needs to be tuned for the higher load of a quad core i7 with hyper threading. With that said, this old girl still did plenty fine in the first cold stop on our road trip...let's take a look.

CPU-Z Validation click for full size... CPU-Z Validation	SuperPi 1M click for full size...	SuperPi 32M click for full size...
Hexus PiFast click for full size...	Aquamark 3 click for full size...	Futuremark: 3DMark 01 click for full size...
Futuremark: 3DMark 03 click for full size...	Futuremark: 3DMark 05 click for full size...	Futuremark: 3DMark 06 click for full size...
Futuremark: 3DMark Vantage click for full size...	wPrime 32M click for full size...

In addition to some impressive numbers, we have a glaring omission for one of the results. wPrime 1024M seems to be absent in this city and the reason for that absence is simple...wPrime 1024M is too bloody hot. Even at the same clocks that we achieved on air in wPrime 1024M, the old phase couldn't handle the heat that a Core i7 puts out with all 8 threads including hyper-threading cranking. Like we said, the phase change unit needs to be re-tuned. The single thread benchmarks don't put out enough heat to cripple the cold of this stop in our tour so they all scale nicely with the cooler temps. 40K is a walk in the park for 05 and 06 cracked 30K without much effort. We also managed to crack sub 7 minutes in 32M SuperPi at a very respectable 5120MHz. Here is the chart of our clocks with phase change cooling.

The temps we see in Phase Change City are nowhere near what can be achieved with even dry ice, let alone liquid nitrogen. Fortunately we don't have to stop here as there is one more spot marked on the map and guess what lies in wait for us there? That's right, Liquid Nitrogen National Park is our next and final stop on this summer's road trip with the Core i7 975 EE processor. So bundle up and get ready for what should be the best location we have seen thus far. These first two stops have been nothing more than road-side attractions compared to what lays ahead.