Taking on the 3DMark06 world record with Asus and 1,000L of LN2

Posted at: Tuesday 19th August 2008 by Antony Leather

We head to Berlin to check out the European round of Asus' Advanced Overclocking Championships where overclockers used LN2 to try and break 3DMark06 records

To cool a CPU with liquid nitrogen, you need to hold the freezing liquid in a metal container known as a ‘pot’ and top it up when needed as it boils off. Many different pots were used, the most sought after ones being made by a well known enthusiast called ‘kingpin.’ He supplies relatively small solid copper pots which are easy to work with as they have a small section at the bottom with holes which prevents the liquid nitrogen from boiling off too quickly. This gives you more time for tweaking and also allows you to maintain a more constant temperature.

WHAT CAN WE DO WITH 1,000 LITRES OF LN2?

It wasn’t long before the first LN2 was poured with the trademark cloud of white steam rushing along the floor from the container. 1,000 litres were delivered for the event which proved to be more than enough. Unfortunately the UK team were hit by three early setbacks. Firstly they lost power while the German team were up and running meaning they lost valuable tweaking time. Then they found that their Vista installation had left them with a German version of the operating system and no-one could change the language to English. This made driver tweaking and installation very difficult indeed. Lastly they found their QX9770 had a cold bug. This didn’t mean it had a case of the sniffles, rather that below a certain temperature, the PC locked up. The cold bug kicked in at -125’C so Paul and David had to carefully keep the CPU temperature above this. Occasionally, over-zealous pouring of LN2 meant Paul had to use an industrial heater to warm the pot up so the PC would actually boot.

Scores in 3DMark quickly passed 30,000 but then all competitors appeared to hit a brick wall. No matter how much voltage teams put through their CPUs (1.9v being quite common) many found that clockspeeds of 4.8GHz were their limit. Tweaking and testing went on for the next few hours with teams feverishly trying new motherboards to see if they could squeeze more out of the CPU. Issues with CrossFire also hampered progress.

FINAL RESULTS

In the end, the Germany and UK teams could only manage circa 28,000 points by using one HD 4870 X2, as two would cause 3DMark to hang. When time was called after 6 hours of solid overclocking, the Swedish team were victorious having scored 31,976 with two HD4870X2’s and a 5.2GHz QX9770, with the Poles in second with 31,962 and Spanish in third with 31,217.

Be sure to check out our images from the day's action by clicking on the pics at the bottom of the page.