The Great Texas Overclocking Competition

Overclocking Rigs

The equipment required to reach this performance pinnacle is the kind of stuff that most of us will never use. However, there are enthusiasts out there who live for the next breakthrough in Cascade cooling, and seeing how these extreme overclockers reach these incredible overclocks is a lesson in itself.

You can see the vapors as Fugger and Chilly1 try to reach the theoretical cooling limit of 193C using liquid nitrogen evaporation.

Macci is specially preparing an ATI X850 for supercooling and a run at the orb.

OPPainter had his rig on a c art so that he could reposition it as needed. This is quite a setup to replace the heat sink/fan on most users’ CPU and graphics card.

So, how extreme is extreme with these three overclocking legends? Try ATI X850 GPU clock rates of 800MHz to 850MHz, X850 memory at 680MHz to 700MHz, and the FX55 running very near at 4GHz (from a default of 2.6GHz). Fugger’s goal was 4GHz during the weekend. He didn’t reach it, but he came very close.

Macci and OPPainter told us that most of the top orb scores were now using OCZ VX memory at voltages from 3.5 volts to 3.7 volts. VX was everywhere in the tests rigs, and we also saw a few sticks of G. Skill and OCZ TCCD memory.