Dry Ice Benching and HD3850 Domination
04.14.08 - 01:26am
I’ve been so busy the last few days that I forgot to post these results. On Friday I took a few hours out of my day to do some dry ice benching with my current bench setup and I took a few world records for my video card. The records that I snagged aren’t something to write home in regards to overall performance but for the card itself they are rather impressive. To be honest though, these are just preliminary results, expect some smashing results sometime in late April.
Setup
I used an aluminum dry ice pot I was borrowing from my friend Jake on my unit along with my twin aluminum GPU mousepots. I was severely CPU cooling limited though as my QX9650 is a rather hot chip above 4.6GHz. During 3DMark 2006 the CPU would drop down to -25 Celsius from an idle temp of -70 Celsius and the pot base temp would drop from -74 Celsius to -30 Celsius by the end of the test. I desperately need to finish my upcoming cascade to really unleash this processor.
- CPU: Intel QX9650
- MB: Gigabyte X48T-DQ6
- RAM: OCZ 2×1GB PC3-12800 7-7-7-20
- GPU: Sapphire HD3850 512MB vGPU modded
- PSU: OCZ 700w GameXStream
Results
I managed to push the GPU to 1107MHz core and 2136MHz memory with 1.64vGPU and stock vMEM. The card ran without artifacting through all the tests so I suspect 1125MHz to 1150MHz is possible with current or slightly higher voltages. The X48T-DQ6 held up really well through the tests with the clean socket area giving me a perfect start for insulation. I am becoming more accustomed to the DDR3 and this new board but as my results show there is a lot of room for improvement with my DDR3 tweaking. Anyways, enough analysis, here’s the preliminary screenies.
Conclusion
I’ve got plenty of room for improvement with these results which is great news. I am aiming for 1st place(World Records?) across all 5 3D benches. I forgot to bench 3DMark 2001, will do that next-time. I will also be benching CrossFire under dry ice during my next bench session, hopefully I can pull the 1st place records for those also. The 65% overclock on the GPUs is positively nuts though and I was surprised it was 100% stable. I hope one of my other three cards can bench as high as this card, if so then I will crush the current HD3850 records. Once again a big thanks goes out to Gigabyte for the motherboard, X48 has really opened up the performance on my QX9650.
A cascade? It sounds like you need one of K|ingp|ns F1 containers.
Looks like a fun little bench session, sorry that pot didn’t work out so well. I am sure my new pot will be a big improvement ;)