14 DAY TRIAL // It appears that the launch of AMD's latest 45nm Phenom II processors has once again sparked the interest of all those overclocking enthusiasts that would go on pushing the limits of some of the latest hardware components on the market. We have already seen how the new chips have been used in some overclocking demonstrations in extreme cooling techniques. The said processors were benchmarked using some of the most popular applications on the market, namely Futuremark's 3DMark06 or the 05 edition. The setup allowed the overclocking team to break the world record, which was then lost to a score achieved by an Intel Core i7-based system.
However, Team Finland, known for its successful attempts at breaking the world record in 3DMark's benchmark applications, appears to always be on the look-out for better ways in order to set new standards. After the story we reported yesterday, regarding one of AMD's Deneb-based Phenom processors, a user pointed out that Team Finland had managed to break the 3DMark06 world record, using an extreme liquid nitrogen cooling solution installed on an overclocked Phenom II X4 processor. The team scored 35698 3DMarks, which landed them in the top spot in Futermark's 3DMark06 best scores.
The system configuration includes an ASUS M4A79T Deluxe motherboard, built on an AMD 790FX chipset, 2GB of Corsair's XMS3-2133 DDR3 memory, two ATI Radeon 4870 X2 graphics processors, a Thermaltake Toughpower 1200W, Tagan BZ 1300W power supplies and a Phenom II X4 processor, clocked at 6187MHz. The guys used a standard heatsink and fan cooling solution for the graphic cards, while the processor itself was cooled down by a Dragon F1 Extreme Edition Full Copper LN2 cooling system.
Now, while such attempts are mostly meant to demonstrate the overclocking potential of AMD's Phenom II processors, it is interesting to see that, for the first time in a while, AMD has managed to bring out a product that can seriously compete with Intel's products in the high-end market segment. As with the Radeon HD 4800-series graphics cards, the new Phenom II processors will likely help the chip maker gain more market share, given the overall price/performance ratio, delivered by the aforementioned CPUs.
A video of the new world record is available at the bottom of this article, be sure to check it out.