The Sunday here at DreamHack has been quite extraordinary, Marcus “Kinc” Hultin and Robert “Crotale” Kihlberg have been working long and hard, sleep is apparently not vital when overclocking is involved, trying to set new performance world records. Earlier today Crotale and Kinc managed to get past Kingpin and his world record with 3Dmark06 which has to be considered an achievement out of the ordinary even for these two gentlemen considering the temperature here. About 5000 computers and the mid summer heat turned out to be too much for the air conditioning, which means that crotale and Kinc not only had to battle the regular difficulties when performing Live overclockings but also temperatures at 30°C/86°F and beyond all day long.
Despite the horrible circumstances with heat and a crippling platform, the E6600 processor was pushed to quite extreme frequencies at a maximal bus speed of 450MHz, almost a new definition of “bottleneck”. A definition we had to withdraw a little later on as the heat almost took the overhand.
But there is no doubt who won the struggle as Marcus and Robert have achieved three new world records using Futuremark’s benchmarking programs during the second day of DreamHack.
Update: It seems Kyosen has been doing some benchmarking himself this weekend and improved his previous world record with 3Dmark ’05 to 24881 using a E6700 at 4.5 Ghz and ATI’s Crossfire system.
The world records have been achieved using an Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 (Conroe, 2.4GHz) processor and ATI’s Radeon X1900 Crossfire system cooled with both advanced compressor cascades, a.k.a. phase change cooling, and liquid nitrogen. The three 3Dmark applications we’re talking about are 3DMark 2001 SE, 3DMark05 and 3DMark06:
3DMark 2001 SE – 74553 points
Core 2 Duo E6600 @ 4023MHz (9x447MHz)
ATI Radeon X1900 Crossfire 843MHz/927MHz (820MHz GPU during Nature)
Corsair XMS2-PC5400UL 447MHz 4-3-2-5 1:1
OCZ 520W + OCZ 600W
Processor cooling: Natrium cascade
Graphics card cooling: Overklokk cascade and LN2
3DMark05 – 23954 points (Kyosen still holds the WR at 24881)
Core 2 Duo E6600 @ 4014MHz (9x446MHz)
ATI Radeon X1900 Crossfire 843MHz/927MHz
Corsair XMS2-PC5400UL 446MHz 4-3-2-5 1:1
OCZ 520W + OCZ 600W
Processor cooling: Natrium cascade
Graphics card cooling: Overklokk cascade and LN2
3DMark06 – 13521 points
Core 2 Duo E6600 @ 3978MHz (9x442MHz)
ATI Radeon X1900 Crossfire 850MHz/909MHz
Corsair XMS2-PC5400UL 442MHz 4-3-2-5 1:1
OCZ 520W + OCZ 600W
Processor cooling: Natrium cascade
Graphics card cooling: Overklokk cascade and LN2
At the moment they’re planning their next attack on the remaining of Futuremark’s benchmarking programs and the world record with 3DMark03. A switch of graphics system to NVIDIA’s GeForce 7900GTX SLI will be the key to achieve this and they will perhaps move into the C hall next to Intel where the ambient is considerably cooler, who knows what will happen there. Kinc and crotale might be the first to hold world records in all four 3DMark categories. Kinc is one of the few who has had world records with three 3DMark categories at the same time in the past so if there are anyone you should keep an eye on it’s these two!
Robert Kihlberg – Swedish Overclocking Champion and Marcus Hultin – Swedish 3dmark Champion
