LAN parties and overclocking go together like cheese and pizza, bread and butter, well you get the picture.  At the NVISION conference and lan party in San Jose this week, several overclockers are attempting to boost their processors to six gigahertz and beyond.  It’s all in the name of fun and friendly competition and “Fugger”, the owner of xtremesystems.org, showed off his three-stage cooler that chills CPUs to minus 100 degrees … that’s Celsius, not Fahrenheit.

Benchmarking and overclocking the upcoming Intel Nehalem processor is going to be tricky business, but Francois Piednoel says we will see “dramatic” speed increases.  At the Intel Developer Forum today in San Francisco, Intel’s Francois Piednoel and Matt Dunford outlined the various issues in benchmarking people will face when testing the new chips.  Perhaps the trickiest of them all will be the “Turbo Mode” which according to Piednoel will be “aware of its environment” and change clock speeds according to temperature and current.