A week or so ago Pieter (a.k.a Massman) was invited to take to the stage at PAX Australia to give a presentation on Overclocking to an audience of keen-minded gamers and enthusiasts. The presentation introduced the core concepts of overclocking, from gaining a few MHz with air cooling, to pro-level record breaking with LN2. The idea was to whet the appetites of the PAX crowd and encourage them to give overclocking a try.

Arguably the highlight of the presentation was a demo the part when YoungPro and Pieter gave a live demo of extreme overclocking by pushing an AMD FX-8370 processor from its default 4.GHz clock to very solid 8.06GHz when cooled to -1820C using LN2. Well, it was at least solid and stable enough to run Microsoft Paint (watch the video and you’ll see what I mean). The demo was a simple proof of concept that illustrated just how far a system could be pushed when you remove thermal limitations.

You can check out the 8GHz demo for yourself by clicking here. The video mostly shows the screen of the demo system throughout with audeio commentary live from the stage. Not everything went exactly to plan, but then again there's nothing wrong with the dd crash or bluescreen. It is interesting to see how even a thoroughly prepped system can misbehave once it gets on stage with an audience in attendance. The good news is that the audience was pretty impressed when the chip did in fact make it past 8GHz.