The overclocking record for AMD's new Ryzen 3 3100 processor is 5,923.62 MHz, a notable feat for a $99 CPU, but as is common with this kind of thing, air cooling or traditional liquid cooling was not enough, and the record overclock was achieved with a steady dose of liquid nitrogen achieved by.

Injecting liquid nitrogen into a CPU is impractical except to track overclocking and benchmark records or to check chip performance without being bound by thermal constraints. It's tedious and only useful for relatively short periods of time (once the supply of LN2 is depleted, the fun is over).

Still, it is an interesting way to see what the underlying architecture is capable of, both as a sport and when the obstacle of heat is removed. Traditionally, the current generation of Ryzen processors have not been exceptional overclockers in typical environments (air- and liquid-cooled PCs). This was also seen in our review of the Ryzen 3 3300X CPU (although our friends at Toms Hardware did a bit better with what may have been select silicon). [It's a different story when using exotic cooling, as demonstrated by professional overclocker TSAIK. He currently holds the top spot on HWBot (via ThinkComputers) with 3100 CPUs. [In stock configuration, the 4-core/8-thread processor has a base clock of 3.6 GHz and a maximum boost clock of 3.9 GHz. Therefore, TSAIK effectively pulls an additional clock of over 2 GHz. This was performed with an MSI Mag X570 Tomahawk motherboard and 8GB of RAM. According to the CPU-Z image accompanying the database entry, he set the voltage to 1.45V. With stock settings, the 3100 should peak at about 1.1V.

Neat, but not for everyday use. Still, AMD's affordable Ryzen 3 3100 and 3300X CPUs are attractive, especially when paired with a B550 motherboard. They bring the benefits of AMD's latest-generation Zen 2 architecture to the lower-priced segment and could pave the way for cheaper but better gaming PCs. And if you are a hardcore overclocker who can supply LN2, even higher frequencies await.