Timeline

• 11:30pm: Session start after a few drinks at the hotel bar. Macci, Sampsa, John Bruno and me were there. John Bruno is ASIC Design Manager at ATI. RD580 is pretty much his baby.
• 12:00pm: Basic system setup complete. Installing blocks on video cards.
• 00:20am: John Bruno goes to sleep and gives us the mission: "Break the record".
• 00:49am: Finally, first 3DMark test runs complete successfully after a lot of crashes before. It seems the GPUs do not like temperatures below -20°C. So the target temperature was now -20° and dry ice was added only when temperatures rose higher.
  
  

  

• 00:58am: First "good" 3DMark05 run completed: 19120 points.
  
  

  

• 01:22am: Looks like we're getting there: 19454 points.
  
  

  

• 01:42am: John Bruno calls and asks for a mission report. Umm John, you went to sleep over an hour ago, are you having 3DMark nightmares? He was indeed happy to hear our progress that we're closing in on the record. Now he could finally get some rest.
• 01:55am: Still no increase in score. There are a lot of crashes. 3DMark05 is completely CPU bound. A few MHz on the GPU do not really matter but CPU power does. So the finnish overclocking team is playing with memory clock, dividers, HT clock etc. There were some REALLY unfortunate crashes - 3DMark was running at a good CPU clock and crashed about 8 seconds from the end of the last test. Another time the CPU was running great but Macci forgot to enable Crossfire. At this time we all were very tired and kept saying "this is the last run".."damn it crashed, let's go down 1 MHz on HT and try a last run again.."..."ah that was pretty good. Lets try this setting for the last run".... so time went by.
• 02:25am: End of overclocking session. The results achieved were very good for the initial tests. Everybody went to sleep, there would not be much, the ATI presentations were starting at 9am the next morning. The plan for the next day was to remove the Vapochill and use dry ice on the CPU as well. When removing the CPU cooling block this nice thermal paste pattern showed up and confirmed that CPU contact has been very good.