This story started in the early July – exactly at the beginning of the Futuremark Lords of Europe Challenge. Remembering last-year success at MSI MOA Worldwide and being angry because of the total unlucky participation in MOA EU Finals me & my teammate T0lsty decided to enter the challenge. The first problem which we considered the main one was getting a GeForce GTX 580 card that could run at least 1600 MHz GPU in 3DMark11. A few words about picking up two golden-sample MSI N580GTX Lightnings is just another story so I won’t publish the details here. Anyway we didn’t manage to find a WR-ready platform so we totally failed in Futuremark’s challenge. Then tried our luck in the other ‘last-MOA-ticket’ contest and I must say we’d better didn’t do that. Two dead samples of a ‘great’ mobo and two killed cherry-2600Ks – ‘not bad’ result, how do you think? The last CPUs we tried were not able to run at BCLK frequencies higher than 109 MHz so MOA 2011 Team HWBOT Qualifier became another disaster for us.
There is a single 3D test where platform doesn’t matter at all and you still can get some respect and boints from the community. Right you are, this one is Unigine Heaven - Xtreme Preset (DX11). Anyway problems do like me & T0lsty – trying at the first time we dini’t manage to catch Hondacity with his 2600.22 DX11 Marks made at 1525/1350 MHz (sure on MSI N580GTX Lightnig). There were some minor problems during that benchie and the best one we did before was 2585.81 DX11 Marks.
Finally after having a short rest we decided to try our luck once more. Till that time thanks to stummerwinters’s achievement we imagined how big is VGA RAM OCing for Heaven results. I bought a new mobo which doestn’t seem to be as unpredictable as almost everything I tried before. ‘ve got a new CPU instead of the killed one in all those contests.
Ready? Ready! Go go go!
The rig:
CPU – Core i7-2600K @5.4 GHz (safe clock just to be sure everything will be fine);
CPU Cooling – Asetek Vapochill LS;
Motherboard: ASUS Maximus IV GENE-Z;
RAM: Corsair Dominator GT DDR3-2133 (CMT4GX3M2A2133C9);
VGA: golden MSI N580GTX Lightning with modded VRAM VRM;
VGA Cooling: LN2 pot by ryba;
PSU: Enermax Revolution+ 1250W + Seasonic SS-760KM
Also used: some minor equipment, insulation etc., 1920x1200 dpi monitor, me & T0lsty
Started our way for glory with a bunch of problems – at first we wanted to get into TOP-1 3DMark11 league but found out that new motherboard still needs some tweaking and tricking of the RAM subsystem. It was too late to cope with that so we moved onto Unigine Heaven DX11 territory.
The pot was mounted onto the card. Cooling down.. checking clocks – everything seems to be fine! Started our run with something like 1625/1400 MHz and got an error on the 18th subtest! That was depressive… Another run (1630/1350 MHz) – and we’ve got only 24xx marks! WTF? Reinstalling the drivers with continuous mistakes on LN2 was not fun at all.
Another several runs – and we did manage to get another 2585 DX11 Marks! Wow, that was sad. Got some gray screenies after two hours – the pot mounting should be tightened!
MB slot was just OK – Vaseline rocks! Had to warm it up a little bit and started again. Checked the clocks – the card seemed to fly OK. Tried max VGA RAM clocks and the best one we could manage this time was only 1360-1370 MHz. Not enough to beat stummerwinter, you might think.. anyway we’ve got the core power! 2617.. aargh, damn! Another try.. freeze ‘cuz of the VRAM unstability. One more.. 2626. Fcuk!
These were the 1640-1650 MHz core runs. Decided to find out max GPU clock for this test. 1560 MHz – and 2644 marks! At last! 1570 – 2654! Wow! Finally it is the time! Several more freezes because of the VRAM unstability, and the best we manage to get is 2661 DX11 Marks made on 1590/1375 MHz!
1600 MHz on GPU have not been beaten just because of the late time. We’ve got tired enough and 2600 marks is a nice result so we stopped.
The card:
Anyway I suppose there is still some GPU power in this N580GTX Lightning and we should work out the VGA RAM clocking issue. Hope that we’ll get 1400+ MHz later. When? Still don’t know. Too tired with benchies, and this is getting not only addictive but also expensive and tons-of-time-taking. So I don’t promise you but we’ll try to be back in a month or two – just till GTX 580 is the flagship enough to beat the records. Stay tuned!
Greetings accepted here:
XtremeLabs.org forums;
HWBOT results discussion tread;
XtremeSystems - this topic -)
Full story:
XtremeLabs.org Hell Kitchen: Unigine Heaven DX11 single-GPU WR by cyclone and T0lsty!@XtremeLabs.org
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