14 DAY TRIAL // It would appear that new CPU frequency records aren't the only things achieved recently, as a pair of overclockers took it upon themselves to drive NVIDIA's strongest video card beyond anything it achieved before.
When promoting a certain piece o hardware, there are multiple ways to make it popular, depending on its type and feature set.
In the case of processing units, whether CPUs or GPUs, or even memory, it is sometimes useful to show just how high a limit they have in terms of performance.
Many CPUs and memory modules, and even some enthusiast-grade video cards, are designed with overclocking in mind.
That said, after such occurrences as AMD's Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition being driven to a record 7344.48MHz, the turn came of a certain NVIDIA graphics card to show its worth.
As reported by XtremeSystems Forums, the card was actually used, by overclockers elmor and Kinc, to set a new record on the 3DMark Vantage benchmark.
Users will no doubt be astonished to hear that the GF110 GPU was pushed over the 1,500 MHz barrier, to 1,504 MHz, while the shaders and memory operated at 3,008 MHz and 5,012 MHz, respectively.
Basically, the memory bandwidth was shot up to 240.6 GB/s, leading, along with the rest of the hardware used in the overclocking, to a 3DMark Vantage score of P45819 (performance preset).
For those that want more numbers, the video board ran on 1.63V vGPU and 1.86vMem, drawing 50A power in itself (volt-mods had to be sued for these voltages).
This new record was achieved on an ASUS Rampage III Extreme motherboard, an Intel Core i7-990X CPU (6.14 GHz) and 6 GB of DDR3 memory (1,750 MHz frequency).
Other pieces of hardware, and whatever else was used, included a high-flow fan for cooling the GPU VRM and liquid nitrogen for the CPU and GPU.