MSI Wind is one of many popular netbooks using Intel’s budget processor Atom. Unlike most manufacturers MSI has started offering an overclocking feature with its Wind netbooks. The Turbo feature is enabled through a BIOS update. You can then overclock the processor up to 24% for some extra performance. This results in a clock frequency of 2.0GHz for the Atom processor normally running at 1.6GHz. This is far from enough for everyone though and now some Australian overclockers have tested what MSI Wind can do under some liquid nitrogen.
Intel’s Atom processor is anything but the optimal choice for overclockers and its modest power consumption means that this kind of cooling doesn’t have the same effect we’re used to seeing. The processor didn’t go much higher after lowering the temperature way below zero degrees Celsius, but they did manage to get the power efficient processor up to 2.38GHz, which is in fact a world record for Atom on a netbook motherboard.
Completely unnecessary and unusable some might say, but we find it quite entertaining and interesting. The limits of modern computer components will never stop being tested and even though this particular overclock may not break any kind of benchmark records, it’s still a fun read. You can find more information and pictures over at XtremeSystems.org.
