What is the best birthday gift an overclocker can give to himself? One overclocking marathon, please. Here at Bright Side of Overclocking* HQ in Denmark, we decided to run multiple components through their paces.
The goal of this session was to reach inside HWbot's Top 10 of world's best scores in a benchmark, regardless of what that benchmark actually was. But given our orientation on multiple graphics cards, there was little doubt what "field of expertise" will be our target area.
Proper insulation is a must when it comes to freezing the processor to -200C. This is how we did it...
Our weapons of choice were as follows:
- Intel Core i7 920 retail processor
- Intel Core i7 Extreme 975 processor
- Kingpin Dragon F1 eXtreme Edition LN pot
- EVGA X58 Classified 760 motherboard
- EVGA GeForce GTX 285 1GB FTW cards [for 1GPU, 2-Way and 3-Way SLI]
- ATI Radeon HD 4890 1GB cards [3-Way CrossfireX]
- OCZ Animal DDR3-1333 6GB Kit [3x2GB]
- OCZ Blade PC3-17000 6GB Kit [3x2GB]
- SilverStone Zeus 1200 1,2KW power supply
- 50 liters of Liquid Nitrogen, provided by AGA (Linde Gas)
As you can imagine, my partner in crime and I went through two weeks of finding the ideal setups, flashing and configuring various BIOS on the motherboard and on the graphics cards in order to find the perfect setup.
When the event commenced, we had everything in place and end result of marathon effort is the following:
GeForce GTX 285 3Way-SLI
xt0m just completed pouring the Liquid Nitrogen into the Dragon F1 EE pot during a 3-Way SLI run
3DMark06 - 32.317 points
- 4th best global result
- 3rd best overall 3DMark06 result in Denmark
3DMark05 - 42.619 points
- 8th best global result
- 4th best overall 3DMark05 result in Denmark
3DMark Vantage - 33.038 points
- 12th best global result
- 3rd best overall 3DMark Vantage result in Denmark
AquaMark 3 - 374.012 points
- 30th best global result
- New national record for Denmark
Intel Core i7 Extreme 975
CPU-Z validation: 5.16 GHz
- 34th best global result for Core i7 975
- New Danish record for Intel Core i7 975
Wprime 32M - 4.77 seconds
- New national record for Denmark (Core i7 975 @ 5.02 GHz)
Wprime 1024M - 2:32:880 [2 minutes, 32 seconds, 880 milliseconds]
- New national record for Denmark (Core i7 975 @ 4.93 GHz)
Intel Core i7 920
CPU-Z validation: 5.11 GHz
- New Danish record for Intel Core i7 920
SuperPi 1M - 8.08 seconds
- 20th best global result for Intel Core i7 920
- New Danish record for i7 920
Wprime 32M - 4.83 seconds
- 11th best global result for Intel Core i7 920
- New Danish record for i7 920
Wprime 1024M - 2:37:720 [2 minutes, 37 seconds, 720 milliseconds]
- 10th best global result for Intel Core i7 920
- New Danish record for i7 920
Overall, we can't say we were satisfied with the Core i7 Extreme 975 processor. Our engineering sample suffered from the infamous cold boot bug, and was also unable to achieve bench stable speeds beyond 5.1 GHz.
We did our best, but the ATI Radeon HD4890 cards just didn't want to properly scale with each other...
Joining in the disappointment room is the ATI Radeon HD 4890 setup. While Radeon cards scale well from one to two GPUs, it seems that putting three or four cards simply does not make any sense. The added latency simply kills any good score, and I believe that one or two ATI cards are the best combo - save your money and grab a better motherboard, such as the one we used here.
If you wonder how the session leader & Captain of BSO* team looks like: meet xt0m (disappointed w/4890 ;-)
When it comes to talking about motherboards, the real discovery of this benchmarking session was the EVGA's X58 Classified 760 motherboard. I had plenty of experience with ASUS and GigaByte overclocking motherboards, but nobody comes close to flexibility offered by EVGA's BIOS.
We were able to tweak each and every parameter of the motherboard and the associated components. Also, EVGA's GeForce GTX 285 1GB FTW boards proved to pack quite the punch in results, as we entered Global Top 10 in 3DMark05 and 3DMark06. Rest assured, this is not the only overclocking session planned for this year - BSO* can't wait to get some DirectX 11 hardware... :-)
For the end, we leave you with the image of LN2 dewar - until next time!
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