Kingpin and Fugger teamed up at CES to do some SLI and Tri-SLI benching with the new nForce 780i chipset and some Intel Core 2 Extreme processors. Partly due to the lack of proper Yorkfield support with the 680i chipset, Radeon HD 2900XT CrossFire has been able to dominate the top of the 3DMark 06 list, but since then the green camp has been able to come back and now do some serious damage to the ORB. Beside 3DMark 06, 3DMark 2001 and 3DMark 03 have also been conquered by the two benchmarkers.
As expected, the 3DMark 03 world record is now actually higher than the 3DMark 2001 record, all thanks to Tri-SLI. Radeon HD 2900XT is simply too strong in 3DMark 05 for GeForce 8800 Ultra.
During CES, Fugger and Kingpin managed to score 116,055 points in 3DMark 2001 using GeForce 8800 Ultra SLI. 3DMark 2001 is quite system dependent and GeForce 8800 Ultra have been the king of the hill for quite some time there. The processor was pushed to a quite impressive frequency of 5843MHz, cooled by Kingpin’s F1 EE LN2 pot.
They continued with some Tri-SLI benching in 3DMark 03, which is so far the only benchmark where we’ve seen some significant results with Tri-SLI. Unfortunately they can’t publish the score, but have provided a screenshot to prove the result. With the processor running at 5809MHz and three GeForce 8800 Ultras they reached 126,688 points.
Click to enlarge
Later on they also published the first 3DMark 06 score over 30,000. Personally I thought Radeon 2900XT CrossFire would be the first to break 30,000 points, but after us having problems with getting a hold of a processor capable of more than 5.4GHz 3D stable, and others not getting the frequencies of the cards up high enough, I’m not surprised Kingpin, and Fugger of course, managed to get their first.
Using a fine Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 running at 5868MHz, and two GeForce 8800 Ultras they scored 30,0138 points. The CPU score of 9410 points is just breathtaking and far better than what any CrossFire system would be capable of. A big part of the result was the new TEK-9 3.0 liquid nitrogen containers for the graphics cards.
Corsair Dominator 10000 was used in the different rigs, which were powered by an Enermax Galaxy 1000W and Corsair HX1000W. You can check out the two threads over at Xtremesystems.org for more information:
