A few days ago, we ran our most successful, highest-watched livestream in the history of GN. The stream peaked at >5300 concurrent viewers for around 2.5 hours, during which time we attempted to outmatch the LinusTechTips 3DMark score submitted to the 3DMark Hall of Fame. This was a friendly media battle that we decided to bring to LTT after seeing their submission, which briefly knocked us out of the Top 10 for the Hall of Fame. As noted in this recap video, we're not skilled enough to compete with the likes of K|NGP|N, dancop, der8auer, or similar pro XOCers, but we can certainly compete with other media. We made a spectacle of the event and pushed our i9-7980XE, our RAM, and our GPU (a Titan V) as far as our components would allow under ambient cooling. Ambient, by the way, peaked at ~30C during the stream; after the stream ended and room ambient dropped ~10C to 20C, our scores improved to 8285 in Timespy Extreme. This pushed us into 4th place on the 3DMark official Hall of Fame, and 3rd place in the HW Bot rankings.
The overclocking stream saw guest visits from Buildzoid of Actually Hardcore Overclocking, who assisted in tuning our memory timings for the final couple of points. We think there's more room to push here, but we'd like to keep some in the tank for a retaliation from Linus and team.
Here are a couple of screenshots of our scores -- before they're inevitably knocked-down by LN2 overclockers:
Our overclocks landed at something like this:
- 49x on Core 0 & Core 1 for the 7980XE, 48x for the rest
- BCLK 100.0MHz
- Mesh 32x
- AVX Offset 0
- VIN 1.95V
- VCore 1.36V
- Vmesh 1.35V
- VCCSA 1.225V
- VCCIO 1.2V
- Uncore voltage offset +500mV
- Extreme Voltage enabled
- Vdroop disabled
For RAM timings on the GSkill TridentZ 3600MHz kit, we ended up around here (conservatively configured -- we have room to improve):
- 4000MHz
- vDIMM 1.85V
- tCL 16
- tRCD 16
- tRP 16
- tRAS 26
- tRRD_S 4
- tRRD_L 6
- tRTP auto
- tFAW 42
- CMD 1
- tWR 24 (would like to drop to 16 with tighter maxmem)
- tRFC 300
- tREFI 32727
- tWTR_S, tWTR_L Auto
- tCKE 6
- tRWDR 6
- tRWDD 6
- tWRDD 6
- The rest auto (for now)
For the GPU, our Titan V was shunt modded -- we shorted the shunt resistors to reduce modify resistance and improve our power availability to the core. At one point in testing, before the livestream, we tripped a breaker as a result of this tremendous overdraw from both the CPU and GPU. Our AX1600i was pushing about 1000W to the system, with the stream system, lights, camera, and other equipment pushing us past our 15A limit for the room. The Titan V ended up at +115MHz core and +115MHz HBM2 for TimeSpy Extreme, which behaves differently than some other tests. This was under an EKWB Titan V block.
Here's another photo of the Frankenstein's monster bench we built:
Here's a list of our equipment used, all linked to Amazon:
- CPU - Intel i9-7980XE (Amazon)
- GPU - NVIDIA Titan V (Amazon)
- Motherboard - EVGA X299 Dark (Amazon)
- PSU - Corsair AX1600i (Amazon)
- RAM - GSkill Trident Z 3600MHz x2 (Amazon)
- CPU Cooler - Thermaltake Floe (Amazon)
- GPU Cooler - EKWB 360 PE + TV Block (Amazon)
- Fan - Noctua NF-A14 (Amazon)
- Fan - Corsair ML120 Pro (Amazon)
- Fan - EK Vardar (Amazon)
We greatly enjoyed this stream. If you want to catch the full video, watch all 2-3 hours here.
Our thanks to all who came to watch! This was tremendously successful, and we greatly look forward to doing this again. The viewers made this everything it was -- we had a fun, active, engaged audience who pitched-in ideas, mourned our initial low scores (one of which was 8091 points -- exactly 1 point under LTT's score), and slammed "F to pay respek" when we finally hit 8099 and onward.
Thank you all for watching. It's events like this that make us love our audience and jobs.
Editorial: Steve Burke
Video: Andrew Coleman