Two Drool-Inducing Overclocked Setups: One Breaks Records, One Hits 96% CPU Overclock

Posted 12/30/2011 at 11:39am | by Brad Chacos

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Few computer-related acts bring the full Maximum PC ethos to bear as much as extreme overclocking. Damn the torpedoes; give ‘er MOAR POWER! and so on. Fridays are always slow news days, and the Friday between Christmas and New Year’s seems to be doubly so, so why not take advantage of the lull and shine on a spotlight on a pair of overclocking feats that showed up on the radar over the past couple of days?

First up, Gigabyte. The company hit a bit of a rough patch this week when faulty firmware started burning up overclockers’ motherboards. To their credit, the dust hadn’t even settled when Gigabyte announced they would swap out any damaged mobos and released a patch to fix the software problem. To show the world that the F7 BIOS update was no mere band-aid, Gigabyte had an overclocker named “Hicookie” take an updated GA-X79-UD3 for a spin with an Intel Core i7-3930K, Kingston HyperX Genesis memory, a Corsair AX1200 PSU and some liquid nitrogen. Hicookie nailed a 5643.3 MHz clock speed with a base clock of 99 MHz and a 57x multiplier. Tom’s Hardware reports that the setup killed the previous Super Pi 1M and 32M and PiFast benchmarks. Check out the video above to see it in action.

AMD’s no slouch in the overclocking department, either, and TechPowerUp is reporting that OverclockWorks (a Japanese specialty shop) achieved an even higher 5,875.5 MHz clock speed in a “suicide run” with an AMD A8-3870K Black Edition processor. The feat was accomplished with a 125 MHz base with a 47x multiplier and a 1.872V core voltage. The Radeon HD 6550D GPU built into the processor hit 1327 MHz, which is more than twice is 600 MHz rating. Number-wise, those turn out to be a 96 percent CPU increase and a 121 percent GPU increase -- not too shabby. Unfortunately, the turbo-charged setup was too volatile to run more advanced benchmark tests, but OverclockWorks thinks this may just be the world’s best A8-3870K overclocking attempt. Check out this link for pictures.