3DMark03 Destroyed by Four HD 5870 at 1250MHz Each

Minor clock tweaks and fan-speed adjustments are quite easy to accomplish, mostly because there are a variety of applications that allow such modifications to be done with a few clicks. When it comes to serious overclocking, however, there are only few enthusiasts that have the skill, the resources and the patience needed to truly smash through benchmarks. As such, news of a certain video board, memory module or CPU going through the roof aren't particularly frequent. When they do arise, however, they have a habit of shocking or leading to severe cases of dropped jaws.

This is exactly what Dean 'Deanzo' Smith did just a couple of days ago. Though not exactly easy, he gathered an EVGA 762 4-Way Classified motherboard, an Intel Core i7-980X central processing unit and four MSI HD 5870 graphics cards and practically, and mercilessly, smashed through the 3DMark03 benchmark.

It is well known that a single HD 5870 is enough for any existing game to be enjoyed, even at maximum settings, though some titles work best on multi-GPU configurations. What Deanzo did was a bit less ordinary than that, however.

After he placed all the parts in their respective slots, he used LN2 (liquid nitrogen), some extra capacitors and a lot of nerve (the good kind) to push the CPU all the way up to 5.8GHz and each of the four GPUs to an astounding 1250MHz. One might find it hard to believe that the 'normal' clocks are of 'only' 3.33GHz and 850MHz, respectively.

What this beastly contraption allowed was a 3DMark03 score of 200,000 and average frame rates of almost 1,000 in Devil May Cry 4 (899.71 to be exact), among other things. This is a colossal leap, considering that the human eye is comfortable with as little as 30-60 FPS.

The entire experiment is detailed by TweakTown here.