A new record in Custom PC benchmarks – 2,401

Posted at: 12:13pm 23rd June 2008 by Ben Hardwidge

Barron Greenback uses a volt-modded P5K3 Deluxe, a liquid nitrogen pot and a 5.35GHz CPU to reach the top of our leaderboard

While most of us would be quite happy with a score above 1,200 in our Media Benchmarks 2007 suite, some CPC readers like to push their hardware beyond the realms of reason in the carefree name of benchmarking. This is precisely what Richard Bunford, also known as Danger Mouse’s arch nemesis Barron_Greenback, did this weekend, achieving an incredible overall benchmark result of 2,401.

This required some serious commitment to getting the most out of his hardware. Not only did Bunford use a combination of a Gigabyte i-RAM and a Western Digital Raptor hard drive, but he also had his Asus P5K3 Deluxe volt modded to allow a higher vcore on his CPU and MCH. After pushing the CPU vcore up to 1.785V on his 3GHz Core 2 Extreme QX9650, he then managed to overclock the CPU to 5.35GHz.

Of course, this would have been impossible using conventional cooling methods, so Bunford brought in the liquid nitrogen (LN2), using an LN2 pot made by acclaimed Polish extreme overclocker, Duniek. The system was accompanied by 2GB of Patriot Viper DDR3 memory, running at 1.8GHz with 7-7-7-20 timings, as well as a bog-standard install of the 32-bit version of Windows XP.

The end results are astonishing, with the overclocked quad-core CPU racking up a score of 3,361 in our Handbrake H.264 video encoding test. Meanwhile the brute force of the overclock also made light work of our single-threaded GIMP image-editing test, with a score of 2,116.

Barron_Greenback, who is also a regular at UK extreme benchers Benchtec, has now overtaken previous benchmark leader Maverik-SG1 on the benchmarks leaderboard, and it’s going to take some serious work to beat him now. However, the Barron tells us that he has another three i-RAMs waiting in the wings for a silicon RAID 0 configuration for his next benchmarking session, which could improve the score even further. We can’t wait to see the results! Check out the pictures of the benching rig below.