Overclocked systems for sale

Highlights: February 25, 2010

Liquid Nitrogen Overclocking extends an ice cold welcome to "Buckeye", owner of the famous MonstaCade Phase Cooled system and designer of the "Trinity" models available here.

Buckeye has a certain fondness for 2-stage cascade cooling devices, which are more intricate than other overclocking builds due to the number of components that are integrated into the system. Essentially a high-tech air conditioning unit capable of delivering temperatures that could chill the marrow of a Wooly Mammoth, cascade cooling systems are always near the top of the benchmarking performance charts. Only much more expensive Liquid Nitrogen and Liquid Helium systems are able to surpass the specs of the cascade systems, but at a fairly high cost.

Buckeye recounted for us his own quest to "get closer to" those incredible benchmark scores posted at the HWBOT Worldwide Overclocking League website and forum.

When I first started all this several years ago I did a large amount of research before even getting started. I noticed several things, people who did really good overclocks had a few things to their advantage. The first would be hardware experience, meaning that they have overclocked a large number of different setups and knew how to setup up benches. The second would be access to special binned equipment such as CPUs that gave them an edge of others. Most of that was unknown to me at the time with what was going on behind the scenes in the overclocking world. How is that when I buy a CPU from Newegg I cannot even get close to what I see on the HWBOT, with the exact same setups? Something was up that I learned later after much trial and error, and money spent. The third was cooling. Cooling was the key to everything and without good cooling you simply could not reach the overclocks that people were getting World Records with.

My mission became clear and turned into a passion for one. I studied this a lot and noticed a few things that I wanted to focus on. I wanted high quality equipment that was safe and performed well. Simple Single Stage Phase units mounted on plywood was not going to cut it for me. There is plenty of DIY projects out there, but I wanted builds that stand out with not only the ability to cool, but quality of the build. I decided to go with a builder who I thought was one of the best, had a vision like I do and has created many unique machines. I contacted Jin Park and he created my first cooling tower for me, which was a Single Stage Phase unit in the bottom of a TJ07 case and a Single Stage Phase Chiller in the top for a chilled water cooling setup. This setup was built on a QX9770 CPU and was able to handle a overclock of 4.8ghz for 24/7 use.

I also added another unique aspect to that build in which I added one of the first high speed Massive Monster SSD Raid 0 which consisted of 8x 32gb MTRON PRO SSD's with an ARC-1231ML controller, this setup is able to attain ~950mb/s bandwidth. So with the highly overclocked QX9770 on a Single Stage Phase unit and the Monster SSD Raid 0 I had an extremely fast machine. Though times change with CPUs the Monster Raid 0 still lives on but with a 965EE CPU now. Later I was called by Jin to see if I was interested in another of his creations, a first at the time it was built, another high quality unique item and the MonstaCade (shown above) entered my benching lab. This is a 2 Stage Cascade and able to reach -111.7° Celsius at the evaporator and spec'd to handle load of 280 Watts. This is a very clean build and installed on a Red Harbor Freight Cart which makes it very easy to move around. Performance for this machine is top notch and is able to overclock CPUs to a new level for me, with ease of use and high performance it is second to none in many aspects.

During all this time other unique items entered into the benching lab, this time for Liquid Nitrogen (LN2) use. With the release of CPUs that had no cold bug from AMD a different kind of LN2 pot was required to handle the huge heat loads and keep overclocks nice and stable at extreme overclocks with these CPUs running close or just over 7.0 GHz speed.

The Phantom Clear Dual Wall LN2 pot is unique in that it has clear walls so you can see what is going on inside the pot with LN2 boiling away. The base of the pot is a work of art and designed in such a way to transfer heat from the CPU to the LN2 cooling medium as efficiently as possible. A great deal of time and machine work went into this LN2 evaporator and it is one of the highest performing LN2 evaporators made. It can also be run in several configurations, tall and short tubes for shows but also with only one tube for the highest performance. This evaporator has taken LN2 cooling to new levels in design and performance. There is also a line of evaporators made for Liquid Helium (LHe) based on the Phantom and it is able to handle temperatures under -200° Celsius. Many World Records were achieved with this LHe evaporator.

More and more unique ways to cool CPUs for many different reason, 24/7 use of for extreme overclocking will be showing up soon and I plan on being in the edge of extreme cooling.

We should probably also mention that Buckeye has his own video channel. You can see some of his ingenious realizations at Buckeye Videos on YouTube. As you examine our site here, the "Trinity" brand are all Buckeye's own personal creations. You can bet your bottom dollar these are maxed out to the extreme, with the utmost attention to detail.