Even though the submission dates from about a month ago, we only spotted this little gem yesterday. Zen1, an overclocker from the United States, submitted an HWBOT Prime score of 2025.77pps with the new Raspberry Pi 2, about half the performance of an overclocked 4.8GHz Pentium G3258 on air cooling. Nothing special I can hear you think, the Raspberry Pi 2 is a quad core SoC so should therefore be much faster than the original Raspberry Pi. Especially considering HWBOT Prime is a multi-threaded benchmark application. However, there is something special about this submission: liquid nitrogen!

As we have seen other overclockers do with the original Raspberry Pi, controlling the temperature of an SOC seems to help when overclocking. Rsnubje from the Hardware.info Pro OC team previously showed how to use the EVGA Epower solution to power and overclock the Raspberry Pi resulting, back then, in a 1.5GHz overclock. Note that Rsnubje is still ranked third in the BCM2835 HWBOT Prime ranking, behind Stelaras and RRainbo. The latter even managed to push the Raspberry Pi to 1.62GHz(!).

Back to Zen1 who pushed the Raspberry Pi 2 - the quad core - to 1500 MHz using liquid nitrogen. We currently do not have that much Raspberry Pi 2 submissions in the database, but it seems 2000PPS is quite a nice performance boost over stock. If you check out Zen1's pictures you'll notice he is taking advantage of the mounting holes to stabilize the LN2 cooling pot.

We really enjoy seeing little projects like this and hopefully some equally creative overclockers will join Zen1 in the pursuit for higher RPI2 performance!