From Stock Cooling to Liquid Nitrogen: My Journey to the 3D Mark Firestrike Extreme Hall of Fame

[Black Sunshine]

This is my history of computer building and in particular overclocking and how i am currently building an ln2 test bench to hopefully get onto the 3dmark firestrike extreme hall of fame.

I built my first computer in september 2013. It had a 4670k and a msi gd-65 gaming motherboard. I was incredibly intimidated by the bios so avoided it. My graphics card at the time was a Radeon 7950. This is where i was introduced into Gpu over-clocking. i quickly got the hang of asus's gpu tweaking software and found the max over clock of 1100mhz. I was blown away by the increase in fps that the overclock gave me and i was instantly hooked. My 4670k was an absolute dud and would do 4.2ghz a 1.2v. That mixed with confusion and arrogance lead to me being discouraged to even attempt to mess with the cpu. Special thanks to Richard Surroz who introduced me to a few over clockers that lead me in the right direction and with their guidance i learned how to properly mess up cpus... 

I was after the pursuit of performance. i replaced my old cpu and gpu with a new MSI GTX 780 Gaming and a 4770k to further follow my new hobby. Gpu boost confused me and i didn't realize that you just couldn't crank a 780 the same way you could with my 7950, I also got another dud of a cpu that required the same voltages for the same clockspeeds. Soon after i bought a second 780 at this point i was into water cooling and was planning to build a costume loop but that never fell through.

I didn't like the msi gaming edition revisions of the card so i sold both of them and bought EVGA GTX 780 Classifieds instead. i was able to get one of them to 1350mhz but it died well it was idling... well there was a flashed bios on it. EVGA hooked me up with another card anyways (which i flashed) the card they sent me was able to achieve 1300mhz but it was at 1.3v. Embarrassingly enough i still had a intel stock cooler, i was fed up with being restrained by it so i bought an h100i which was still a huge disappointment to me anyways. I Getto-Clocked my 4770k to 4.5ghz and 1.35v this wasn't stable at all in prime 95 but if it is good enough for fire strike then it is good enough for me.

My msi-gd65 gaming motherboard served me well but it was time for it to go, i replaced it with an Asus Maximus formula.

Sorry if everything is alittle awkward, their is so much more to say but i wana get past this.

Now that we have my past out of the way lets talk about now. I can include alot more photos to because i know to actually take them.

As i said earlier i am building a ln2 test bench. i have already finished binning cpus and have ordered the rest of the parts except the graphics card.

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The specs for this monster is

Intel Core i7 4790k

Gigabyte Z97x SOC

16gbs Gskill 1800mhz

Kingston SSDNow 120gb

EVGA SuperNova G2 1300w PSU

EVGA GTX 980 Classified (when it comes out)

DimasTech Bench Test Table Mini

Ek EK-SF3D Inflection Evo LN2 Pot

EK SF3d Critical Point Gpu Nitrogen Pot

Testing the hardware

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Motherboard doesn't inherently support 4790k so i had to flash the bios to avoid possible instabilities. The 4790k is kind of a golden egg but i am worried that it will shit the bed at higher clock speeds this is not stable by any means this is just for benchmarking after all this was done on an h100i 

Also don't tell me what is a safe voltage for a chip because truthfully i don't care.

Haven't pushed ram yet. kinda regret not getting 2400mhz but it is what it is.

Haven't gotten the graphics card yet since it isn't out yet but i had a talk with Vince Lucido and its suppose to come out soon. (evga gtx 980 Classified)

Set my personal firesrike extreme record on the gigabyte motherboard. Cards were at 1300mhz on the core and 4.8ghz cpu overclock.

Score was 8688. Seems kinda low, if you look at similar systems their are reference 780s at stock clocks out scoring me.

My ln2 pots get here on tuesday. so in the meantime I hope you enjoy this rather irregular build log and follow if you want to see more

This is my first time doing a build log so sorry if its all janky. Thanks

[napster007]

Awesome!

 

I hope one day I also fulfill my dream of being an enthusiast.

[Black Sunshine]

If you are interested after everything to run liquid nitrogen on a cpu it will run you back about 500 for everything you might need.

Also i am building another test bench tomorrow and i am going to see if i can beat 9000 in firestrike extreme 

[Black Sunshine]

I am just finished benchmarking my first 780 and have moved on to the second. i am focusing on single card scores instead of sli. First cards limit was 158 power target. 1330mhz on core, 1.3v with k-boost. add 650mhz to v ram. will post scores soon 

[Black Sunshine]

My testbench gets here tomorrow, for now i did all of my overclocking on top of a box.

here is a quick score. my configuration scored number 14 on similar systems. Not as cool as the hall of fame but not bad considering i am aircooling.

http://www.3dmark.com/fs/3017955

Everything tested on the same day are most likely the same people and also there a few 780 sli systems in their as well. 

[HippY]

Could you make a quick and dirty ln2 guide with pictures when you do it please ?

[PhantomChevron]

Seems interesting, but for some reason all the pics are broken