SuperPI 1M World Record Broken

When it comes to overclocking PCs, not many people take things to the extreme, that is, if they do so in the first place. Overclocking is said by many to be a form of art, in which you create something that nobody else has. If you ask me, it's very similar to PC Modding, and also the two subjects at hand are closely related. The main form in which these two elements are expressed is by doing them as a single process.

When you are what is called an "enthusiast", the goal is to obtain the most demented computer ever. That includes making visual and structural modifications so that the appearance of the computer becomes unique, and the second issue is to increase the factory settings for the components, the ones that allow it, to a sky high level. Each type of art has different ways in which the author expresses him or herself; when it comes to painting, you need a canvas and a brush, in writing, a pen or a computer will do, when it comes to computers, an entire array of elements is necessary.

The first and foremost is knowledge, if you don't know what you are doing, then don't do it, or chances of you screwing up are exponentially increased by the attitude "you've got to make mistakes in order to learn." After that element is out of the way, you must consider the platform you are going to use, cooling, power requirements, take extra precautions because accidents might happen, and so on. Then comes the trial and error part of the deal as you try to achieve the highest possible CPU clock, 3DMark score, or, in this case, SuperPI score.

For a long time a certain barrier has been the goal for overclockers worldwide, the nine second barrier in SuperPI 1M. It was about time somebody had taken down the previous record and lower the time under nine seconds, and responsible for that is s.O.t. (saturday's Overclockers team Italy). Their record brings down the time to 8.985 seconds, but it was only possible by overclocking an Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 to 5619MHz by using LN2 cooling. They've also modded an ASUS P5W64 WS Pro motherboard and used an Enermax Galaxy 1000W power supply. Their record reminds me of the time when Vincent "k|ngp|n" Lucido broke the 3DMark06 world record by using a pair of NVIDIA 8800GTX graphics cards in SLI. Somebody was so happy that they made a "for everything else, there is Mastercard" type of commercial.