Last week, PC Pro gave out a reader challenge to see whose rig could render a 3D graphics benchmark the quickest. Well what was supposed to be a simpleton challenge for the casual blocks turned out to be some feast.

Well such enthusiastic challenge surely would run very far, as Intel engineers caught wind of it, and took up the challenge themselves. Their entry turned out to be the winner of kush, courtesy of Intel’s overclock nuthead Steve ‘DaFridgie’ Anderson. His rig was overclocked to nearly 5GHz and cooled to -40 degrees Celsius.

“Well here at Intel we could not resist the challenge, particularly when in our IT department we have overclocking nut Steve ‘DaFridgie’ Anderson. We gave him the challenge of beating 60 secs but restricted him to only a single-socket setup. Last night he ran it on his rig. Result: 50 seconds to complete.”

The setup was kinda unfair to the public mass, but PC Pro never actually put any restrictions on the entry, so no biggie there. The rig was phase-cooled using a huge ass freezer box (seen in the right of the photo above) chilling the 6-Core mighty processor. Yeah that thermometer wasn’t faulty, it’s running at minus 40 degrees Celsius. Mind bogging indeed. Thought, it’s actually rather common to see enthusiast overclockers using means of liquid nitrogen (kingpin and coolice come to mind).

Steve, the Intel engineer in question, giddily supplied some specs for the machine of his glory, which ran the benchmark in 50 seconds:

The system is built as follows:

• Chassis – Dimastech test rig
• Processor – Intel Core I7 980x retail CPU
• Memory – Corsair Dominator GT memory ( 2250 CAS 8 ) running at 2046 at CAS 7
• Motherboard – EVGA Classified X4 E762 motherbaord
• Power supply – 2 x Corsair 950w Single Rail Power supply (1 for system, the other for graphics card) automatically switched
• Graphics card – 1 x EVGA GTX480
• CPU cooling – Asetek Lightspeed refrigerated cooling system with a running temperature range of -40 to -32oC at 18oC ambient temperature
• Storage – Seagate 160GB Sata drive (16mb cache)

*Construction – Custom built for performance, not for looks!

Somehow, I think its abit overkill to use a 950w Corsair PSU solely to power up that GTX480. There wasn’t mention of any overclocking done on the card itself. I’m sure 950w would be fairly enough to power up the whole system actually. Anyway, he’s still not amazed by that, and is planning to push the setup even further.

I would expect that as we cool the processor further down to extreme cold temperatures (-180C) with Liquid nitrogen cooling, we would see stable runs on this benchmark in the 5.7-6.0ghz range.

We’ll be doing some extreme overclocking around the end of august and I’ll add this benchmark to the list to see if we can provide an even more impressive result.

[PC Pro via Gizmodo]