We took Sweden’s two best overclockers and gave them ATI’s latest flagship to do what they do better than anyone else. With extreme hardware and extreme cooling the hunt for extreme results has begun. In this series of articles you will be able to follow Kinc and Crotales escapades.
Since ATI launched its new Radeon X1900 series we’ve seen several articles and reviews with these cards, where in NordicHardware’s own review we took it one step further by fitting ATI’s monster with water cooling. A review you will be able to read very soon. Radeon X1900 XTX is truly a chip with a lot of heat coming out of the core and we noticed that some extra cooling really did the trick.
After working our way through the review of Radeon X1900 XTX we started to discuss what fun we could have with ATI’s latest power package, simply the fastest video card available. The answer was quite obvious, make it even faster and see how far we could go using the most extreme methods we know of. To do this we don’t only need extreme hardware but also someone, or some people, to do it for us.
Robert “Crotale” Kihlberg is the author of our Radeon X1900 XTX review and has just before this he had been crowned Swedish Overclocking Champion, through his amazing world record with an astonishing 203% overclock as Crotale pushed his Intel Celeron Mobile 1.4GHz to fantastic 4.242GHz. Robert has also recently done some successful extreme overclocking attempts with Intel’s flagship Pentium 955 Extreme Edition and to create a real “dynamic duo” we paired Crotale up with multiple 3Dmark world record holder Marcus “Kinc” Hultin. Kinc recently took home the 3DMark05 category in the Swedish Performance Championship.
Crotale and Kinc has since then made a reputation here at NordicHardware and not just with their individual achievements, but but also together as their article about extreme cooling a video card. Kinc and Crotale have once again joined forces and used Intel’s 955 Extreme Edition platform to see what results they would be able to achieve together with ATi’s new flagship. The goal was setting a new world record, and a world record we got, or records to be more precise.
The first stop was at Robert “Crotale” Kihlberg where Intel’s power package Pentium 955 Extreme Edition was waiting calmly not knowing what was just about to hit it. Crotale, Kinc and Incido (another reigning Swedish Overclocking Champion) more or less sat down for an entire weekend and built up a really nice sweat with both Intel’s 955XE processor and ATI’s Radeon X1900 XTX. With the help of compressor cooling and 30 liters of liquid nitrogen they managed to keep the fighters at bay and ran the system for a consecutive 6 hours, an impressive task alone considering the circumstances.
The first day was more about getting to know the hardware and especially ATI’s new flagship and how it handled extremely low temperatures , something we’ve had problems with before, both with cards by ATI and NVIDIA. After a whole lot of testing they concluded that the X1900XTX could handle down to -50 °C (-58°F) which is pretty much perfect for a single stage compressor. Said and done, day two the single stage compressor was fitted to the video card and liquid nitrogen was used to cool the processor.
The target was the renowned and most frequently used system/3D tests on the market, namely Futuremark’s 3Dmark series where the following hardware was used throughout the tests. Frequencies varied between the tests though.
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Test system |
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| Hardware | |
| Motherboard | Asus P5WD2 – vcore, vdimm, vdroop |
| Processor | Intel 955XE 3.46GHz |
| Processor cooling | Mousepot + LN2 (-140C) |
| Video card | ATI Radeon X1900XTX |
| Video card cooling | Natrium Single Stage (-45C) |
| Memory | Corsair 5400UL |
| Power Supply | OCZ PowerStream 520W |
| Software | |
| Operating system | Windows XP (SP2) |
| Drivers | nForce 6.70 Catalyst 8.203 |
| Benchmark program | 3DMark2001 SE (3.3.0) 3DMark03 (3.6.0) 3DMark05 (1.2.0) 3DMark06 (1.0.2) |
The final results achieved with the four programs are as follows:
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As you can see they managed to achieve 3 world records during the weekend. 3Dmark2001 SE and 3Dmark06 paired with Intel 955XE and Radeon X1900 XTX turned out to be a very good combination. There is no doubt that both Intel’s and ATI’s flagship are power hungry, but it might still be interesting to know how much power the PSU pulled from the outlet. During Mother Nature OCZ’s power supply consumed over 700W (!), considering its specified power it is no surprise that not everything was needed to power the system, but this was one extremely power consuming setup.
Below you can find a series of pictures from Crotale and Kinc’s overclocking sessions with Intel 955XE and Radeon X1900 XTX.
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Last but not least we have a video made by Crotale that he has named “LN2”. As with his earlier creations it’s an impressive video with matching music and some spontaneous bursts of emotions during the tests.
Update: Unfortunately we had to remove the video due to the excessive bandwidth.
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When the weekend had passed it was time for our dynamic duo to split up, but that doesn’t mean that “ATi Radeon X1900 XTX – Project World Record “ was put on hold. Kinc took the Radeon X1900 XTX card home where a brand new Athlon 64 FX-60 was waiting. As most of you know Kinc has conquered several world records with his Athlon 64 systems and the time had come to conquer some more. Just as with the Intel 955XE system the benchmarking was a success and except for a new world record a great milestone was passed with a single video card…
The Radeon X1900XTX card did however get some rest from its manhandling together with the Intel 955XE system on Wednesday (08/02/2006) as some sleep and other things had to be acquired.
The first tests Kinc did with his Athlon 64 FX-60 system was to check the problem they had with the video card memory when running the 955XE platform. The early hours of Wednesday was spent investigating this and Kinc managed to get it up to 922MHz before it locked up.
Not exactly overwhelming but still ~10MHz more with the important video card memory, which may very well become a factor in the end. After that an eight hour long session was used running air cooling to test the processor, video card and memory of the relatively new system. No serious attempts to set any new records with air cooling was done though, the best result was almost 14 000 points with 3DMark05. A lot of time was spent optimizing the system for the individual tests. With Game Test 1 the system memory is very important and therefore the memory was optimized with a divider and the best possible timings. Game Test 2 wants raw processing power, but also graphical power. So here you just have to reach as high frequencies as possible. With Game Test 3 the ratio between GPU and video card memory was optimized since the graphical power has a large impact here.
Thursday evening had come and a bit into the night it was time to bring out the heavy stuff. A three hour long session with liquid nitrogen used with both video card and processor was followed by another 6h long session, where the last ended sometime during Thursday night/Friday morning with a very impressive result.
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Test system |
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| Hardware | |
| Motherboard | DFI NF4 SLI-DR Expert |
| Processor | AMD FX-60 |
| Processor cooling | Mousepot + LN2 (-43C basetemp) |
| Video card | ATI Radeon X1900XTX |
| Video card cooling | Chefnr1 LN2-tub (-50 basetemp) |
| Memory | 2x512MB Corsair XMS 3200LL BH-5 |
| Power supply | OCZ PowerStream 600W |
| Software | |
| Operating system | Windows XP (SP1) |
| Drivers | Catalyst 6.2 |
| Benchmark program | 3DMark2001 SE (3.3.0) 3DMark03 (3.6.0) 3DMark05 (1.2.0) 3DMark06 (1.0.2) |
After almost emptying his last liters of liquid nitrogen Kinc came up with the following results:
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After many hours of testing and many crestfallen crashes it finally went all the way, 16004 points with 3Dmark05 with single video card. A mighty improvement of the old record at 15572 points that Hipro5 had with his Radeon X1900 XTX card. Most important was perhaps to get passed the magic 16000 points, which to be honest many SLI and Crossfire systems can’t even do.
Neither energy nor nitrogen was left to do any tests with Futuremark’s other programs, but we know that we will see more of both Kinc and Crotale soon, more about that later on.
Below are some pictures from Kinc’s overclocking sessions with his Athlon 64 FX-60 and Radeon X1900 XTX.
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After almost a week of benchmarking “ATi Radeon X1900 XTX – Project World Record “ turned out pretty good and this article is far from over. We know that our dynamic duo will be reunited next weekend and then with two Radeon X1900 cards. This is to do some serious Radeon X1900 CorssFire tests, both with the Intel 955XE and Athlon 64 FX-60 platforms. So far Project World Record has accomplished the following;
3Dmark2001 SE:
World record with Intel’s NetBurst architecture (955XE)
First over 50000 points with Intel’s NetBurst architecture (955XE)
3Dmark05:
World record with Intel’s NetBurst architecture (955XE)
First over 15000 points with Intel’s NetBurst architecture (955XE)
World record with a single video card (FX60)
3Dmark06:
World record with a single video card (955XE)
With 4 world records behind us Crotale and Kinc will keep working to set new records and we can promise you that “ATi Radeon X1900 XTX – Project World Record “ will be back soon!
NordicHardware’s Overclocking Team will continue to push the limits for computer hardware can do and you will get to see a lot more of this in the future. Feel free to share your thoughts in the forum about similar projects and reports that might be interesting to know about.
