Did the engineer explain why the higher temps contribute to stability? I've not heard of such a phenomenon before.
Just... he mentioned I might not have as much success using LN2 or something more exotic, compared to standard water or Peltier cooling.
Overclocking was my bread and butter as a [relatively] broke teenager in the late nineties, around the era of the first Athlon Thunderbirds, when you could take a 1GHz chip and [maybe] OC it to 1.5Ghz. It was a great time to be alive, and yet this is the first case I've heard of where LN2 would not give you a dramatically better result 99.99%+ of the time! I still miss HardOCP and Kyle Bennett and his team's reviews.
That one t-bird with char spots... It still worked reliably somehow, I might even have it in a box somewhere. Those swirly finned CPU coolers were shit! I came home every day after school and volted/burned the hell out of that poor chip, not realizing what I was doing.. lol.
That's one nice thing working on these little mobile chips—I don't need a $300 cooler, I can use a cheap little water block, or a small peltier element that doesn't cost much at all... and it's not being a space heater for the room. It's only pulling maybe 10-20W max.
Except maybe the $100 Corsair liquid coolers, but c'mon, they aren't real water cooling
The secret sauce was running it at 200x11, with 1T capable RAMs, and that thing was snappier than "bog standard" 3200+ systems a considerable amount.
Without much of a voltage bump, and a good cooling solution, it ran within its thermal design without noise, and with rock solid stability. That system lived more than 15 years IIRC.
Kyle stil posts on Hardforum, and much of the team went on to https://www.thefpsreview.com/ but it's not really the same, because there's no 50% overclocking by just moving a jumper. CPUs and GPUs get factory overclocking that's probably within 10% of what you can get with reasonable efforts.