Hardware Enthusiast Claims 3DMark05 World’s Record Score, Discloses Test Conditions

by Anton Shilov
10/28/2004 | 10:54 AM

A hardware journalist from Croatia claims he had achieved the world’s record score in 3DMark05 benchmark for ASUSTeK Computer, who proclaimed the world’s top score in the most-popular graphics measuring tool earlier this week.

“What ASUSTeK forgot to mention was that the world record was achieved not by NVIDIA guys, who coudn't manage more than 9200, but rather a score from Mr. =]S[=Red)-(ead, aka me,” said Theo Valich, a Hardware editor for PC PLAY magazine in Croatia.

ASUS’ system that scored 10 118 points in 3DMark05 utilized the best possible technologies for the gaming PCs available today: NVIDIA Multi-GPU Scalable Link Interface technology, AMD Athlon 64 FX-55 processor and NVIDIA nForce4 SLI core-logic. It was unknown which ForceWare driver was used during the testing.

“The system featured AMD Athlon 64 FX-55 running on 800MHz HyperTransport link. The mainboard was 0.3 revision, was forbidden to take a picture of, and the chipset was revision A01. Memory used was […] Micron DDR400 with CL2.5 3-7-3, so a higher score would be attainable by using Corsair/OCZ low-latency memory and CPU on full 1GHz HT,” Mr. Valich explained.

The tester said the score was achieved on an unreleased NVIDIA ForceWare 7x.xx driver that was not certified by FutureMark, the creator of 3DMark05.

“The [GeForce 6800 Ultra PCI Express] boards ran at 450/1200, so, a typical Gainwardish Ultra/2600 clock speed. Hard drives were okay, but the system was heavily un-optimized. After a page-file/GUI/driver tweaking, score was 9975. Second run gave 10 118,” he added.

While there are no GeForce 6800 Ultra PCI Express supplied with stock clock-speeds of 450MHz for chip and 1200MHz for GDDR3 memory, Theo Valich said the final retail score could over 11 000 on overclocked systems.

ASUS did not reveal any peculiarities of the testing in its statement released to press earlier this week.