
Overclockers OGS and GRIFF have secured new victories, dominating the AMD Radeon R9 290X and Intel Xeon L3014 hardware leaderboards.
They say Mondays are tough, and for some professions, the start of the week is a true test of patience. The same goes for competitive overclockers chasing top leaderboard spots. Mondays usually bring a flood of bench results submitted over the past seven days, meaning any enthusiast risks losing their first-place ranking and having to start their experiments all over again.
This Monday was no exception: Bullshooter lost his gold medals in the 3x AMD Radeon R9 290X category to OGS, while Luumi yielded the top spot for the Intel Xeon L3014 to GRIFF. But first things first.
Italian enthusiast GRIFF once again proved his LGA 775 CPU overclocking skills, reclaiming the top spot for the Intel Xeon L3014, along with global single-core gold in the HWBOT x265 Benchmark - 4k category:
The chip was cooled by a phase-change system and pushed to 5715 MHz. The single-core CPU was paired with a high-end ASUS Rampage Extreme motherboard and a Corsair Dominator GT RAM kit.
Here is what GRIFF's test bench looked like:
His colleague, Greek overclocker OGS also made his move, grabbing two gold medals: one in the 3x AMD Radeon R9 290X category and another in the global 3x GPU ranking:
Each GPU was overclocked to 1018 MHz (if you can call it that, considering some non-reference R9 290X models run at 1050 MHz out of the box) while the memory clocked in at 5000 MHz effective. However, as you might have guessed, the real hero here isn't the graphics cards, but AMD's 16-core monster CPU.
Right now, CPU performance is the main driver for high scores in 3DMark05. Given the brute-force performance of a Ryzen 9 5950X pushed to 6100 MHz, AMD's flagship chip is the perfect choice for the job.
This allowed OGS to secure two gold medals with a score of 95,019 points. The three R9 290X cards and the Ryzen 9 5950X were installed on an ASUS ROG Crosshair VIII Dark Hero motherboard. Here's a look at the bench setup:
We should note that a dual-GPU Radeon R9 295 was used to represent two of the three cards. However, since its onboard GPUs are identical to the R9 290X, this is fully within the rules.