14 DAY TRIAL // Graphics card manufacturers are locked into an epic battle meant to push their solutions over those of the competition, Gigabyte being one of the companies that often resorts to the results obtained by overclockers in order to push its brand awareness among enthusiasts, the Taiwanese company just announcing that their GTX 460 SOC video card has gained the world record in 3DMark 05 and 06.
According to the press release, Romanian overclocker Matose achieved 50,231 points in 3DMark 05 and 36,380 points in 3DMark 06, taking the lead in these two benchmarks.
The result was achieved using a Gigabyte GeForce GTX 460 Super Overclock graphics card that was cooled using liquid nitrogen (LN2), allowing Matose to raise the GPU clock to 1,225MHz and the memory to 1,250MHz.
For comparison, Nvidia's reference GTX 460 works at 675MHz and 900MHz, respectively, while the “regular” factory overclocked Gigabyte GTX 460 SOC has its core running at 815 MHz and the memory chips set at 1GHz.
The rest of the system was comprised of a six-core Intel Core i7 980X processor and an ASUS Rampage III Extreme motherboard (oddly, I don't see this specified anywhere in Gigabyte's press release).
Just as the graphics card, the CPU was chilled using LN2 and overclocked way beyond its regular operating frequencies, reaching 6,121MHz, quite an impressive feat if we think that its stock clock is set at 3.33GHz.
The GTX 460 is build using Nvidia's GF104 core that is made up of 336 stream processors, 56 texturing units and 32 ROPs, the 2GB of memory being run over a 256-bit wide bus.
At the time of this article, the top spot in 3DMark Vantage, for the GTX 460 graphics card, was held by a Chinese overclocker that managed to get 27,757 points by also using a Gigabyte GTX 460 SOC graphics card and an even higher core clock.