Join for quick access. Enter your email below and we'll send confirmation plus sign you up to our newsletter.
By submitting your information, you confirm you are aged 16 or over,
have read our
Privacy Policy
and agree to the
Terms & Conditions. Geographical rules apply.
Stay On the Cutting Edge: Get the Tom's Hardware Newsletter
Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox.
You are now subscribed
Your newsletter sign-up was successful
Join the club
Get full access to premium articles, exclusive features and a growing list of member rewards.
An account already exists for this email address, please log in.
Overclocker uses camping freezer to push RTX 5050 to nearly 3.5 GHz, smashes world records — smallest Blackwell GPU gets 23% clock boost
An incredibly ambitious hardware modder with a penchant for both sublime and ridiculous GPU tinkering has boosted an RTX 5050 to nearly 3.5GHz with a camping freezer. The result is clocks boosted to nearly 3.5GHz, a 23% uplift, and a handful of broken world records. This test was performed as part of what Trashbench calls "the dumbest competition on YouTube" in a video about his battle against fellow overclocking YouTuber Clock Bench to see who can push the GeForce RTX 5050 harder.
(Image credit: Trashbench)
Determined to win, Trashbench shunt-modded his Gigabyte RTX 5050 card to unlock the card's power limits and crank it as hard as possible. He ended up with a sustained clock rate of 3468 MHz, some 23% increased over the stock 2820 MHz. This pushed the little GB207 GPU to the top of the 3DMark benchmark charts, and indeed, it is probably the fastest GB207 on the planet—for what dubious merit that honor awards. #1 is #1, though, no matter the context.
Trashbench handily defeats ClockBench in the four tests presented. (Image credit: Trashbench)
Thanks to the Techni-Ice freezer and the 60/40 glycol mix, GPU temperatures apparently hovered between -12℃ and 15℃, depending on the benchmark load. The GPU reported a power draw of just 78W, but of course, due to the shunt mod, that value is completely inaccurate. Shunt mods work by replacing or bypassing the sensing resistors on the GPU's +12V lines, so the card isn't able to detect its own power consumption correctly; this has the effect of unlimiting the power, so you're only capped by voltage and thermal limits.
With a freezer like the one Trashbench used, then, you're really only limited by the voltage the card can supply, which is exactly how he achieved his impressive 23% overclock. To be frank, 23% doesn't sound like all that much to this greybeard's ears, but the days of 100% overclocks are sadly long gone; most modern GPUs struggle to achieve 10% even with a shunt mod.
I've always said that Australians and Texans are kindred spirits. There's no mystery here: we both like our humor dry and a little disturbing, we both tend to minimize even mortal peril, and we both share a love of self-reliance. These qualities manifest in many ways, but one of the most visible is our willingness to rig up just about anything to make a point, like ol' mate Trashbench, who was also the bloke responsible for the world-record Intel Arc B580 overclock about two weeks ago. That card wasn't modified beyond replacing the cooling, though.
Buc-ee's trucker hats off to Trashbench for his achievement; it's readily recognizable redneck ingenuity from the other side of the planet.
Zak is a freelance contributor to Tom's Hardware with decades of PC benchmarking experience who has also written for HotHardware and The Tech Report. A modern-day Renaissance man, he may not be an expert on anything, but he knows just a little about nearly everything.
"GPU temperatures apparently hovered between -12℃ and 15℃, depending on the benchmark load."
One site where I worked had a large climate control test chamber where the air temperature could be set down to -55℃, but I used smaller chambers at -40℃. The chambers used a lot of liquid Nitrogen which arrived on site in tankers.
It would be interesting to see if the whole RTX 5050 card could survive much lower temperatures than a camping freezer. I know they use LN2 and Helium for CPU overclocks, but they tend not to cool the entire commercial spec circuit board.
.
