More fun with 3870X2 - LN2 first day

[T_M]

Some of you will have been following the progress of my ghetto mounting plate for running two pots on one 3870X2 here:

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...d.php?t=176230

Well, after some intital hurdles and troubleshooting, i finally pulled some results, and pretty decent ones at that
While the scores are "low" for what i expected, im sure with RAM tweaking, vMEM/clock testing (yet to happen), and more LN2 (ran out after ~40L) i could have grabbed the ultimate top spots in both '06 and '03

I find the 3870X2 to be a "fragile" card compared to the brute force nVidias im used to.
Temperature played an important role, but not in the ways i had expected.
I was actually running these tests below at only -20 to -30C on the pot faces.
If i let the pots get too cold for too long, the exposed areas of the card (to allow the power circuits to breathe) would ice up and then i would hit walls being unable to run any GT all the way thru.
Unfortunately it took me about 20L and 2-3hrs to find that out
But you'll be pleased to know that the GPU's were more than happy playing at -90C or more.

Furthermore voltages are funny buggers, with differences between idle and load, GPU1 and GPU2, temperature dependency, etc. In the end i would have to recheck/adjust) my volts before every run. At one point i even had to resolder the tiny GPU2 mod while still set up when i was having some troubles.

So without further ado:

3DMark'06 - 26k
QX9770 @ 5350MHz on Kayl Pot Rev 2
Gigabyte GA-X48T-DQ6 Rev 1.1 (vCore mod)
Patriot DDR3 "1866MHz" @ crappy speed and 7-7-7-16 1T (untweaked)
Retail Powercolor 3870X2 @ 1066/1062 real on 2x Kayl GPU Pots (vcore/vmem)
WD5000AAKS SATA @ 115MHz PCI-E freq.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTIMrTHthAw
http://service.futuremark.com/compare?3dm06=5169124





And earlier on during testing:

3DMark'03 - 80k
QX9770 @ 5350MHz on Kayl Pot Rev 2
Gigabyte GA-X48T-DQ6 Rev 1.1 (vCore mod)
Patriot DDR3 "1866MHz" @ crappy speed and 7-7-7-16 1T (untweaked)
Retail Powercolor 3870X2 @ 999/1044 real on 2x Kayl GPU Pots (vcore/vmem)
WD5000AAKS SATA @ 115MHz PCI-E freq.