14 DAY TRIAL // Back in January 2007, OC Team Italy managed to break the 8 GHz barrier with an overclocked Pentium 4 631 CPU. A couple of days ago, the same guys at OC Team Italy attempted to overclock even further their magic P4 631 processor and they ended up boosting it to an impressive 8180MHz clock.
This achievement translates into an outstanding 173% overclock. But the Italians did not play only with the CPU, as this one had a locked multiplier. To raise the frequencies over the previous 8 GHz record, the team also had to tweak motherboard FSB, pushing it up to 545MHz. By the looks of it, the guys over at OC Team Italy could sooner or later decide to shatter this record again. They may also try newer CPUs from the Core 2 Duo family.
Speaking of C2D, Marcus 'Kinc' Hultin and Jon 'Elmor' Sandstr?m from Nordic Hardware succeeded in overclocking a Core 2 Extreme QX6700 processor to 5006 MHz. They used an ASUS's Striker Extreme motherboard and also a pair of ASUS GeForce 8800 Ultra cards in SLI mode, running at 800MHz / 1200MHz. This setup allowed them to set a new world record as far as CPU overclocking is concerned. Unfortunately, because not all of the components responded properly, their GPUs did not manage to dethrone Kingpin's +25,000 3D marks score in 3DMark 2006. However, their 24,604 3D marks score makes it to the second position. It's true, Kingpin only managed to overclock the CPU to 4880MHz, but his memory modules responded a bit better.
The Nordic Hardware guys claim that they were mainly focusing on overclocking the CPU, while making use of liquid nitrogen techniques and special Vaseline materials. Nonetheless, they noticed that the SLI graphics card setup can take 800/1200Mhz (1,5V), far more than what the cards are capable of in normal conditions. Currently, Marcus and Jon are trying to determine what exactly might have gone wrong with those hardware components that didn't show full responsiveness in their tests.