Turrican wins HWBOT Jan '10 OC Challenge - Contest big success!
Turrican, Austrian top-overclocker, has won the first edition of the HWBOT OC Challenge. In a competition which was long dominated by Romanian overclocker ZM, the last 24h proved to be (once again) the most important part of the competition. Showing of excellent overclocking capabilities of his Gainward Ti4600 Golden Sample, Turrican went up to an astonishing 424/417MHz, resulting in a score of 3330 marks. He will be receiving his GIGABYTE GA-E7AUM-DS2H shortly!
That was, however, not the highest core clock frequency reached in this competition. Gradus, our current Hardware King, used LN2 to increase the clock frequency of his Ti4200-8x to a phenomenal 440MHz! Next to Gradus, several other overclockers also used LN2 to push the GeForce 4 series to the absolute maximum, resulting in a series of record-breaking benchmark sessions:World record breakers
- Alibabar (GeForce4 Ti 4200 64 @ 370/340MHz – 2565 marks)
- D’n'B (GeForce4 Ti 4800 @ 390/372MHz – 3120 marks)
- Egm_xt (GeForce4 MX integrated GPU @ 240/370MHz – 281 marks)
- Egm_xt (GeForce4 Ti 4800 SE @ 357/357,5MHz – 2941 marks)
- Gradus (GeForce4 Ti 4200-8x @ 440/387,5MHz – 3292 marks)
- Turrican (GeForce4 Ti 4600 @ 424/417MHz – 3330 marks)
- ZFeSS (GeForce4 Ti 4200 128 @ 367/384MHz – 3006 marks)
Next to that, there’s the overall GeForce4 3DMark03 world record. During the competition (10:14 AM Jan 11th), we already reported about Matti OC’s record breaking score of 2717 points, breaking a world record that had been up since 1,5Y. Looking back at the results, we see that no less than 8(!) overclockers managed to break that record … amazing!
As far as HWBOT is concerned, we consider this competition a big success. Not only was the competition attractive enough to motivate people to test these old graphics cards, several overclocking records have been broken and saw a lot of activity in the forums. We’re pleased to see that this there are still people out there who enjoy the challenge of old hardware!
For the details of the competition, you can always have a look at the official competition page where you will find the official ranking, lots of scores and even more extreme GF4 competition rigs.Addendum: The 97.44 Driver
A few hours before the deadline, it became apparent that the ForceWare 97.44 driver was the one giving the best results. Although this driver doesn’t support the GeForce 4 series natively, with a simple .INF modification it’s no problem to use these in combination with any graphics card. The reason why this driver delivers a bit more performance is quite simple: it seems that parts of the 3DMark03 code aren’t rendered correctly, making parts of the scenes not visible. Although it’s not entirely ‘neat’ to use this driver, neither the competition rules nor the HWBOT general rules exclude the usage of this driver. If anything, this driver is perfectly within HWBOT guidelines. In the future, we may switch to a fixed driver for a 3D competition, although many hardware fanatics, including myself, are of the opinion that finding the right drivers is half the fun.
To show you the effect of the driver, we have attached a couple of screenshots of the affected 3DMark03 scenes. Note: only GT2 and GT3 are affected, GT1 is not.
(Clickable)
