Steve Burke, the Editor in Chief of Gamers Nexus, was in attendance at the G.SKILL Booth during Computex a few weeks ago where HWBOT hosted Extreme Overclocking Workshops. The idea behind the workshops was to simply expose members of the tech media that were attending Computex to the practice of actual hardcore overclocking. Here’s a video of the workshop from the Gamers Nexus YouTube channel.

Roman begins the session with Steve by explaining that much of the work needed for LN2 benching happens long before you even turn the system on. Motherboard preparation, specifically as regards to insulation, is very important to when pushing components to sub-zero temperatures. Fortunately for Steve, due to time restrictions, the riig we had setup at the G.SKILL booth was prepared well ahead of time.

The rig used for the workshop session was based around an ASUS ROG Maxiumus IX Apex motherboard, upon which a Core i7 7700K Kaby Lake processor was installed with a Kingpin Cooling Venom LN2 pot mounted on top. The system also used G.SKILL Trident Z DDR4 memory with a G.SKILL Ripjaws Power Supply.

Roman goes on discuss the general approach to hitting a target CPU frequency of 7GHz, a massive 67% beyond stock frequencies. Load up the LN2 BIOS profile and then start gradually raising voltages, not forgetting to adjust the PLL Termination settings to help get the system running at full pot. In fact Roman goes in to some real detail to describe the differences between the different voltage settings. He also discusses issues such as delidding, thermal paste cracking and other more esoteric topics that most tech media are not so familiar with. In the end, Roman showed Steve how to successfully adjust the settings to hit the mythical 7GHz target.

You can catch the video here on the Gamers Nexus YouTube channel.