14 DAY TRIAL // Lately, most of the unveiled 3DMark world records have been achieved by using one or more of Asus' highly overclockable GeForce GTX 580 Direct CU II, so it's refreshing to see that Gigabyte can also compete in this race, as one overclocker managed to capture the 3DMark 03 dual-card world record by using a pair of Gigabyte GTX 580 Windforce 3X graphics cards.
In order to reach this score, the two GTX 580 cards had to be overclocked past their regular operating frequencies together with the Sandy Bridge system that they were run on.
The result was a 23% increase in GPU clocks speed over the stock GTX 580 Windforce 3X frequencies as the card reached 980MHz, while the memory was run almost 200Mhz higher, at a full 1200MHz.
As far as the rest of the system is concerned, this was built around an Intel Core i7 2600K processor and used a Gigabyte GA-P67A-UD7 motherboard as well as 4GB of Corsair Dominator GT memory run at 2133MHz.
Just as the two graphics cards, the processor was also overclocked to reach 5.6GHz and was cooled using a single stage cascade cooling system.
The GTX 580 Windforce 3X is based on a custom Gigabyte design and packs a heavily modified printed circuit board as well as a new cooling system that uses no less than three fans to blow the hot air away from the cards.
Compared to the stock GTX 580, this allows for improved overclocking and better temperatures under load, and Gigabyte also states that the setup will lower the noise generated by the card while in operation.
The overall 3DMark 03 world record is still held by the Asus GeForce GTX 580 DirectCU II, but this was achieved using a quad-SLI setup and a six-core Intel Core i7 990X processor.
