14 DAY TRIAL // Needless to say that the ATI Radeon HD 3870 is the most powerful graphics card on the market, since Nvidia's GeForce 9800 X2 seems to have got caught in traffic. The two RV670 graphics cores linked together do a great job - they have the same computing power as the Cray-1 machine. However, they can do even better when overclocked, although there's the risk of setting your ultra-expensive graphics card on fire.
Yes, it's true, the cooling system is not quite a state-of-the art device. However, improved cooling could allow overclockers push some real power into their displays without any reason to worry about the card's integrity. Water-cooling has paid off when paired with the Radeon HD 3870 X2, but there are more efficient (and unconventional) cooling methods.
One of the overclocking enthusiasts has demonstrated yet another Radeon HD 3870 X2 unit with some exotic cooling system. What can be more interesting than cooling your video card below the freezing point, down to the edge where the electrons refuse to move?
When water-cooling is just not enough, go hunting for some liquid nitrogen. The overclocker designed three mounting Brackets to hold the specially crafted pots for liquid nitrogen, as shown in the movie below. These pots are placed on the graphics card's two processing cores, which results in extremely low temperatures (around -70 degrees Celsius). The overclocker managed to squeeze frequencies from the stock value 825/900MHz to 1066/1062MHz.
The achievements are extremely impressive, given the fact that the two cores have to run at exactly the same frequencies. The third pot was used to cool a Core 2 Extreme QX9770 processor running at (surprise) 5350MHz. The whole system scored 26,073 points in the 3DMark06 benchmarking software. Other enthusiasts managed to score much more using more GPU and CPU power, an extremely well optimized system and two Radeon HD 3870 linked in CrossFire.