After Kinc and Crotale’s display in our booth at DreamHack Summer 2006 hardly anyone doubted that our Swedish overclocking aces would be capable of pushing Intel’s X6800 Core 2 Extreme beyond the magic 5GHz limit. They got stuck on 4.95GHz during DH, only because of limitations with the motherboards FSB settings. Now a few days after DreamHack our OC guru Marcus “Kinc” Hultin has started a new benchmarking session with Intel’s coming flagship. Thanks to some quick assistance from ASUS’ motherboard engineers we at NH got a hold of a new BIOS which had higher FSB settings, moving the limit from 450MHz to 500MHz, more than enough to be able to reach 5GHz.
It took Kinc a few hours to get acquainted with the new BIOS and last night he managed to achieve the second score in the world with SuperPi 1M using a Conroe over 5GHz. Kinc ran the X6800 processor at manigificent 5040MHz which is about 30MHz faster than what the Japanese overclocker TAM ran his Conroe (5013MHz) at when he scored the world record at 10.140 seconds. Do note that TAM turned off one of the cores in the Conroe processor which makes it easier to reach higher frequencies, Kinc had both cores running.
As far as we know this is the highest anyone has ever been able to push Intel’s Conroe processor, SuperPi 1M stable, and the only thing missing right now is a new SuperPi world record and a historial result beneath 10 seconds. Unfortunately 5040MHz was not enough as the final score ended at 10.234 seconds. There is still no possibility to set the multiplier which probably would’ve made it possible to score the first SuperPi 1M result beneath 10 seconds and with sufficient optimizations for SuperPi we would probably already have a world record. We know that Marcus will not stop here and that new SuperPi optimizations are coming so don’t go anywhere, new results are coming; the hunt for the 9 seconds have just begun!
System specifications
Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 @ 5040MHz (11x458MHz, 1.73v)
Mousepot LN2 cooling -125°C (Coldbugg at -128°C)
ASUS P5W HD Deluxe (i975X)
Corsair XMS2-PC8000UL 458MHz 4-3-2-1 1:1 (2.8v)
OCZ 600W
5.04GHz wth SuperPi 1M – 10.234 sec
