When AMD first released the 5000+ version of the Black Edition series of processors, it seemed pretty unimpressive. However, the Black Edition processors are a lot like the old FX processors: they come with an unlocked multiplier, and are hand-picked for overclocking. And so, while the Black Edition processors may not be the best at stock clocks, they certainly are good at overclocking. Just as an example, a Chinese overclocker was able to push his 5000+ Black Edition to a respectable 3.5GHz on stock cooling.

Nobody is ever satisfied with just leaving a world record intact. And so, renowned overclocker "MickeyMouse" recently slapped together a Core 2 Duo E6850 clocked at 5,190MHz , two ATI Radeon HD 2900XT's in CrossFire, a couple gigabytes of DDR3 clocked at 923 MHz with 7-6-5-15 timings. With a little help from liquid nitrogen and dry ice, MickeyMouse pushed his system all the way to 34,792 points, snagging the world record. MickeyMouse aspires to break 35,000 points.

Jon "elmor" Sandström decided to have another crack at the record books, and was recently gratified. Using a fully modded ASUS P5W64 WS Pro, a Core 2 Extreme X6800, 2GB of Mushkin XP2-8500 (running on a 1:1 ratio at 3-3-3-5), an S3 Trio64+ PCI graphics card, a Silverstone Zeus 850W power supply, and of course, several liters of liquid nitrogen, Elmor set a new Core 2 Duo speed record. His Core 2 Extreme X6800 reached speeds of 5854 MHz, as proven by his CPU-Z Validation. Rumor has it that Elmor still has 30 liters of LN2, and is going to try beating the SuperPi record.

Asustek Computer, one of the world's largest producers of computer components, on Tuesday unveiled what it calls "the world's first hardware based real-time overclocking device for graphics cards" along with its new Nvidia GeForce 8600 GT-based graphics board. The tool may be useful for not very experienced overclockers.

Asustek's OC Gear real-time overclocking device should be installed into a spare 5.25" bay and connected to an USB port. Specially developed software will allow end-users to adjust system master volume, graphics processing unit's (GPU's) clock-speed, GPU fan speed using a simple knob as well as monitor GPU temperature and current frames per second (FPS) information.

The EN8600 GT OC Gear graphics card from Asus is equipped with 256MB of high-speed 1ns GDDR3 memory as well as high-performance cooling system, thus, can provide sufficient overclocking potential for those seeking additional performance.The Asus OC Gear device itself is also compatible with various graphics cards by Asustek Computer, the company said, however, it did not reveal whether the software needed for Asus OC Gear will support other than EN8600 GT graphics boards.

Most people might think that an old application such as Aquamark cannot be used to judge the gaming performance of systems that are designed to run games like Company Of Heroes and Supreme Commander. Well, to a lot of overclockers, Aquamark is still a very useful tool to benchmark computers.

And on to the juicy stuff. HWBot user Joe_Cool, on May 31st, officially smashed the Aquamark record to smithereens. Joe_Cool got his score of 267,877 points with...

• A lot of liquid nitrogen, enough to cool both his CPU and GPU.
• An Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 @ 5247MHz
• An NVIDIA 8800GTS @ 828/1134 (2268 DDR) MHz

Joe_Cool is still testing with this deadly combination, so he may smash his own record in the coming days. We'll keep you posted.

Here is the result and result details.