This weekend I travelled to Taiwan, where Gigabyte helped arrange some pre-release GA-X48T-DQ6 motherboard testing.

Teaming up with local overclocking master and good friend Hicookie (Team XtremeFastest), and with Gigabyte's newest flagship motherboards on hand, I was really excited to see what results we could achieve.

After a day of sight seeing/drinking, we set to task on Saturday afternoon in a hotel room putting together the system we hoped would take down the 3DMark'06 Single Card WR:

-Intel QX9650 Yorkield (Retail '39)
-Gigabyte GA-X48T-DQ6 Rev 1.1 unmodded - thanks Gigabyte Taiwan
-Patriot DDR3 PC3-15000 (1866MHz) rated @ 8-8-8-24 - thanks Patriot Taiwan
-XFX nVidia 8800GTS 512Mb G92 vGPU/vMem modded
-Gigabyte 'Odin' 1200W Quad SLI Ready PSU
-Western Digital 500Gb SATAII running XP SP2

Cooling for the system above was based on:
-Kayl Rev2 CPU pot
-MickeyMouse GPU MousePot Rev?
-100L LN2

Some photos of the system for Saturday:









After a few hours of set-up, we had prepared a totally unmodified GA-X48T-DQ6 with vaseline coating all surfaces/contacts of components around the socket and NB, and insulated in the usual manner using foam sheet and then tube.
The video card came pre-prepared with a coating of enamel paint on entire rear surface and some front surface with clear nail polish. This card is a real animal as proven already on air and DICE, so i expected nothing less on LN2 than what we saw

So anyway, here you have it - new WR for single card in 3DMark 2006:.
Check out that shader clock

22,586
http://service.futuremark.com/compare?3dm06=4326503
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXP4qtquw04


We really pushed the system as hard as we could to obtain this result, with voltage on the GPU maxed before OVP/OCP kicked in (1.505V idle) and the CPU at 1.9V in BIOS (~1.85V after drop/droop). LOD was 15.
The vCPU was kept reasonably "low" because we wanted to avoid any problems with blowing mosfets which had plagued the X38/T-DQ6 series.

The following day (Sunday) we were focussed on the other 3D benchmarks, with #1 hwbot for GTS in all our target.
Again we prepped a very similar system, however this time we traded the Patriot DDR3 for Hicookies "magic" ADATA GTR stompers.
We also revised the insulation on video card pot a little, but generally the system was still the same.
Today we would end with pushing up the vCPU to really test the motherboard under extreme conditions.





And now for the results - #1 in all for 8800GTS 512Mb!
Unfortunately, FM havent approved 169.21 drivers for 3DMark'03, so we cant publish that result. All other results were fine though

'05 - 30,985
http://service.futuremark.com/compare?3dm05=3821158


'03 - 60,259
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v310/T_M/03ORB.jpg


'01 - 95,862
http://service.futuremark.com/compare?2k1=9306874


AM3 - 307,997


And now some action shots from the 5 days I spent in Taiwan, with my friends having a great time.
Really huge thanks to Tim from arranging all of this, and to Jensen for being involved.

Hicookie - you are truly an overclocking master in my eyes and really much of the success of the weekend can be attributed to your fine knowledge of troubleshooting crashes and tweaking performance

Thanks also to my GF who accompanied me for the full 5 days, living in a hotel room doing "extreme TV" as hicookie says.