14 DAY TRIAL // Team Katana from the Land of the Rising Sun has reportedly achieved the highest 3D Mark 11 Extreme Preset result in the world, using their single-GPU card based on AMD’s Radeon HD 7970 architecture.
The card’s GPU was clocked at an amazing 1747 MHz, while the video memory worked at a 1971 MHz actual frequency. Considering the fact that the memory was GDDR5, the effective speed was 7884 MHz.
In order to obtain these results, the card’s power module was modified to obtain a higher than normal voltage. The volt-mod was done carefully to avoid tripping the OCP (over-current protection), and to avoid activating the over-heat protection of the graphics card's VRM.
The target GPU voltage was 1.895 V.
Liquid nitrogen was chosen as coolant. While there were others using liquid helium, this one is pretty hard to find, and it is also more expensive.
Team Katana’s setup went on to achieve the work record when it comes to 3D Mark 11 Extreme Preset score with a single-GPU card. The score was X3757.69 point, thus getting 1st Rank in HWBOT’s “GLOBAL 1X GPU RANK” and “RADEON HD 7970 rank.”
The working temperature of the GPU was around -145 degrees Celsius when the card was idling, and around -137 degrees when in full load.
The benchmark setup was powered by an Intel Core i7-2600K processor that was also overclocked to around 5 GHz. The platform was ASUS’ Maximus IV Extreme mainboard based on the P67 chipset, while the whole system was fueled by a 1200 watts power supply unit.
We think it won’t be long until some other team comes up with a single-GPU record using Nvidia’s GTX 680, but we’re quite happy to see that AMD’s GPU has so much overclocking headroom.
With AMD’s new price reduction, the 79xx family of card became much more attractive.
