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For our liquid nitrogen testing we insulated the motherboard with a combination of artist eraser and Vaseline and mounted our K|ngp|n F1EE liquid nitrogen pot on top of the CPU with a dab of Arctic Silver Ceramique for the thermal compound. After pulling the pot down to around -188 Celsius we began our runs starting with 3DMark 2006. We were using a Gigabyte MA790FXT-UD5P with two Corsair Dominator GT 1866C7 2GB modules, two AMD HD4870x2 video cards at 822MHz core 950MHz memory, and a single Corsair HX1000 PSU powering the entire system.
Next up we began testing for maximum frequency with all four cores enabled. We had to push the vcore up to 1.8v to achieve the following screenshot and it was only stable long enough to save the image before blue-screening. Regardless, this shows that with additional testing it should be possible to run 3DMark 2006 at a slightly faster frequency.
Unfortunately, we only have a few images of the system after we were finished benching. Just so everyone knows this board has had the pot pulled from it several dozen times and this particular time we were a bit rough with it. This is not normal to say the least; this is the first time we've seen this happen. Click the images for a larger resolution.
At the end of the day the AMD Phenom II 42 TWKR processor was a blast to play with. Compared to our two retail Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition processors the TWKR was around 100MHz higher through 3DMark06, but a whopping 300MHz higher with the CPU-Z max frequency. If we can source more LN2 it'd be interesting to see how each individual core performs but overall it is safe to say the TWKR will scale roughly 100MHz to 200MHz higher than the average retail Phenom II X4 955 no matter what cooling method you are using.
Reaching nearly 6.6GHz on a Phenom II X4 processor was an awesome experience and it just goes to show how far these cores can go with the right cooling. AMD has done a great job with the Phenom II processors and the TWKR edition processors really highlight that success.
