Overclocked GeForce RTX 4090 Inches Closer To 4GHz Breaking A Benchmark Record
Overclockers look destined to break the 4GHz milestone with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card within the next few months. Meanwhile, overclocker CENS got within touching distance of this milestone, with a record-breaking 3,930MHz this weekend. CENS's score represents a hugely impressive >75% overclock compared to reference, but to get to this speed required lashings of liquid nitrogen coolant.
The GeForce RTX 4090 is already one of, if not the fastest, consumer graphics cards available, pushing any 3D acceleration task to the limits in 2023. It earned its reputation as the ultimate choice for gamers running at a reference speed of 2,520MHz. And, even at reference clocks, it is a force to be reckoned with.
Reference GeForce RTX 4090 designs typically come with very large air coolers to help tame the 500W+ they can consume under load and a modest overclock. So, how did CENS achieve this almost 4GHz clock speed, which was stable enough to run benchmarking apps? We mentioned LN2 in the intro, which is an extreme overclocking essential to chill the processing cores when under duress. Sufficient LN2 was maintained in a specially designed GPU cooling pot and specialized equipment from Kingpin Cooling and Elmor Labs.
In addition to the Colorful GeForce RTX 4090 iGame LAB, essential system components used in this record-breaking overclocking feat include:
- Intel Core i9 13900K 'Raptor Lake-S' CPU with LN2 cooling running at 5.8GHz
- EVGA DARK Kingpin Z690 motherboard
- 32GB of G.Skill DDR5-4300 RAM
- Specialist OC equipment from KingPin Cooling and Elmor Labs
Using the above equipment, CENS almost broke the 4GHz barrier with an RTX 4090 (just 70MHz away) and managed to gain first place in the HWBot GPUPI v3.3 - 32B benchmarks record table. The overclocker's LN2 cooled rig calculated Pi to an accuracy of 32 billion digits using the RTX 4090 GPU in just 46 seconds and 383 milliseconds. We note that all the top 10 results in this table were achieved using RTX 4090 graphics cards. CENS's result is nearly a second faster than the second placed entry, but nearly seven seconds better than the 10th placed entrant.
