Kingping Cooling member TiN used liquid nitrogen to push an Nvidia GeForce GTX 690 4GB to 1,547MHz.
A liquid nitrogen fanatic has successfully hit a world record by overclocking an Nvidia GeForce GTX 690 4GB to a whopping 1547MHz - over half again as fast as a stock card.
User TiN over the on the
Kingping Cooling forums took a stock Nvidia GTX 690 4GB dual-GPU graphics card - already the fastest card around - and subjected it to below-zero temperatures using liquid nitrogen cooling in order to achieve his world-record result. Originally, TiN had pushed the board to 1,600MHz, but stability issues forced a drop to 1,547MHz at which point the card was reportedly completely stable.
The impressive overclock left the board running over 500MHz above its stock clock, and pushed the board's 4GB of GDDR5 video memory to an effective speed of 7,336MHz. The results in the 3DMark 11 benchmarking suite are nothing short of breathtaking: paired with an Intel Core i7-3960X Sandy Bridge-E processor running at 4.5Ghz, TiN scored 20,962 points - a full 50 per cent above the stock clocks in the same system.
Not content with that impressive score, TiN then added another nitrogen-chilled GeForce GTX 690 4GB to the mix for quad-SLI. Although the presence of a second board - and a total of four GPUs - meant a drop to 1,450MHz, the results speak for themselves: 28,812 points in 3DMark 11.
While TiN's record-breaking efforts are not to be denigrated, they're not exactly suitable for day-to-day use: the cooling system, a pair of metal open-topped reservoirs with copper contact plates for the GPUs, need to be topped up with liquid nitrogen at frequent intervals and fill the room with no-longer-liquid nitrogen as the liquid evaporates on contact with 'warm' surfaces.
Despite this, it's an indication of just how far Nvidia's latest high-end GPUs can be pushed - given a powerful enough cooling system. With a more sedate watercooling setup, it should still be possible to push the GeForce GTX 690 4GB to impressive speeds - although the high retail price of the boards will likely leave many unwilling to experiment with anything too risky.
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Discuss in the forums Replydunx
Lol, if you had a butler... :)
Still a cracking score but I wonder what a single GTX 680 could be taken too :)
Zero FPS at 5760 x 1,600, as the 690's launch driver doesn't work at that res in ARMA 2!
Define 'very small'!
Gaseous nitrogen in a non ventilated space is EXTREMELY dangerous. It is very slightly lighter than air and will therefore create pockets of gas at ceiling height in a heartbeat. While 'Air' contains a lot of nitrogen it also contains O2 and if this 20% (ish) of O2 is pushed out with nitrogen then...
Sleepy sleepy - not wakey wakey.
You can be knocked unconscious with zero warning symptoms. It's not unheard of for people in labs to be killed like this... and then someone goes to help... and they fall over... and someone else goes to help...
Obviously locking yourself in a barely ventilated room with a container of boiling LN2 (particularly one whose boil rate was accelerated by being connected to a heat source like a heavily OCed PC...) for an extended period would be a bad idea, but simple precautions would eliminate the risk.
As for "define 'very small'", well I have no idea how much LN2 you need to cool a pair of highly OCed dual GPU graphics cards (and perhaps a CPU too), but the boil rate can't be too outrageous. Bear in mind that the boiling nitrogen is still very significantly below ambient temperature, so it will sink rather than rise, notwithstanding that its molar mass is lower (and so it is less dense at equivalent temperature and pressure than air) - this is why you get the characteristic waterfall of vapour flowing over the edge of a container of boiling nitrogen. It will then mix with the air, so you shouldn't get appreciable pockets at ceiling level. If anything, pockets will form at floor level, so you'd want to watch out for family pets if you had this installed in your house :-)
I'd suggest an oscillating room fan to mix the air with the boiled N2 combined with an extractor to draw in fresh air would be perfectly sufficient.
EVGA forums dude had them at that under ln2
It is clear that two gtx-X80s are always better than a single gtx-X90, but with liquid cooling I'd hope two gtx-690s would certainly be better than four gtx-680s, especially if the dual-GPU cards had twice the VRAM of a single gtx-680.
I really need to figure this out. I was about ready to buy two EVGA Classified GTX-690 Hydro Copper cards as soon as they drop.