Looks like overclocking is the mood of the season. If we had the AOCC in Hong Kong recently, half the world away in France, a group of 13 hard core overclockers have managed to overclock a Intel Core 2 Quad 6600 2.4GHz processor to an outrageous 5.1 GHz! They were a part of the hardware review site Tom's Hardware.

These maniacs used liquid nitrogen to cool down the Intel processor. In liquid form, nitrogen boils at -196 Celsius. The canister used to cool the processor was set on top of the CPU, instead of a standard cooling system. A DFI DK-P35 motherboard was used and was covered with foam to prevent it from being damaged due to condensation. The configuration had 1GB DIMM of DDR2 memory and a Geforce 8800 GTS 512MB graphics card. The team disabled two of the four cores of the processor and managed to stabilize its temperature at around -125 Celsius by pouring liquid nitrogen.

The French were claiming a world record which it definitely is not - thanks to the efforts of another bunch of Italian nerds who managed to overclock a Pentium 4 631 to an insane 8.18GHz back in 2007. Ouch! What's the matter with these guys?!