Test Setup

Motherboard	Gigabyte GA-A75-UD4H
Processor	AMD A8-3870K Black Edition
Memory	GeIL Evo Corsa GOC316GB2400C11QC G.Skill Ares F3-2133C9Q-16GAB G.Skill RipjawsZ F3-19200CL9Q-16GBZHD
Thermal Compound	GELID Solutions GC-Extreme
CPU LN2 Pot	Otterauge LN2 Container Rev 4a
Thermometer	Voltcraft K102  + 2x K Probe
Memory LN2 Pot	Christian Ney's experimental LN2 Container
Graphics Card	3dfx Voodoo3 2000 PCI
Power Supply	Seasonic X-Series 750 Watts
Hard Drive	OCZ Vertex 2
Cooling	Liquid Nitrogen

We've presented the setup already in an earlier article. There you can also find a guide how to insulate the board that you don't run into troubles with condensation water:

AMD Llano Extreme Overclocking on Gigabyte A75-UD4H

I'm aware that the LN2 pot isn't a beauty. But it really does the job.

Some words about Hynix Memory chips: those chips are able to clock very high when you use loose timings (not like the well known Elpida Hypers that are also able to clock high but with tight timings instead) especially on AMD systems such as Bulldozer and Llano. Here is a good exemple of what they are capable of: Placid pushed a value memory kit which runs at 666 MHz default to 1456.1 MHz using air cooling without any heatspreaders.

Here we used a Llano A8-3870K setup with Hynix H9C CFR based memory kits. The memory multiplier has been set to 9.33x this means with our setup, which can hit 200 MHz HTT, the theorical memory frequency would be 1866 MHz (effective DDR3-3732). Reaching clock speeds which are this high is impossible if you use standard aircooling. In this case we need much higher voltages and very cold modules. That's why I did the runs using Liquid Nitrogen as a coolant. Fortunately the memory doesn't have a cold bug, which means that they do their job perfectly stable at -197°C. This ensures maximum overclockability. The memory voltage used was between 1.9 volt and 2.0 volt.

Page 1 - Introduction

Page 2 - Test Setup

Page 3 - Results

Discuss this article in the forums.