Extreme LN2 Overclocking

Below you can view a series of motherboard screenshots I took during my preparation phase with regard to suiting up the ASUS Crosshair III Formula motherboard for some extreme cooled goodness.

And here's the reward :

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What a fun little processor the Athlon II 630 turned out to be. With a stock speed of 2.8GHz, I was able to overclock to 4GHz using after market air cooling and a very respectable 5586 MHz with LN2.

You can see the validation for the CPU here.

Unfortunately this combo had a hard HTT wall of 400. Even though 399x14 was relatively easy to obtain, 400 would instantly give me a black screen with the board shutting down soon after. I was unable in the time allotted to find a way around this wall which is unfortunate, as I was able to bench multi-threaded applications very close to that mark, so the CPU should theoretically have more to offer.

In my results I have added stock and 4GHz scores generated on air. For LN2 I did a base collection at 4.9GHz as that was my maximum boot speed. All clocks after that was utilising the ASUS utility "Tweak IT" to increase the clock speeds within Windows.

I have also added a spread of benchmarks that we utilise in CPU competitions.

Important Editor Note: Our maximum overclocking result is the best result we managed in our limited time of testing the motherboard. Due to time constraints we weren't able to tweak the motherboard to the absolute maximum and find the highest possible FSB, as this could take days to find properly. We do, however, spend at least a few hours overclocking every motherboard to try and find the highest possible overclock in that time frame. You may or may not be able to overclock higher if you spend more time tweaking, or as new BIOS updates are released. "Burn-in" time might also come into play if you believe in that.