The release of Intel's Alder Lake processors and accompanying new motherboards seems to have inspired a significant wave of new benchmark world records. Of course, many of the achievements were stemmed from CPU-based tests, but over recent days some important 3DMark graphics benchmark world records have also fallen. Both the Fire Strike and Fire Strike Extreme world records have been claimed by overclocker Biso Biso wielding an AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT. Meanwhile, the 3DMark2001 SE world record has been claimed by overclocker Rauf using an Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 Ti.
3DMark Fire Strike / Extreme World Records
A 3DMark Fire Strike score of 62,389 was achieved by Korean OC expert Biso Biso on Thursday. This record is notable for a couple of reasons. First, it was done using the AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT pushed to a 3,147 MHz core clock. Secondly, it unseated a Quad-SLI Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti-powered record by Kingpin (61,206) that had stood for almost two years.
On Sunday, Biso Biso achieved another world record pole position, this time in Fire Strike Extreme 1x GPU, and validated by HWBot. Checking through the details of the feat, you can see it confirmed that the Korean overclocker used liquid nitrogen (LN2) cooling on both the Intel Core i9 12900K and XFX Radeon RX 6900 XT used in the benchmarks.
This Fire Strike Extreme record of 39,515 wasn't a big leap over the previous holders, and the top 10 all appear to use the same GPU, so this test looks like a sweet spot for AMD's top-end consumer GPU.
3DMark2001 SE World Record
Yes, people still compete fiercely over achieving the highest score in 3DMark2001 SE, which was released in, you guessed it, 2002. With such aging software, it might not be surprising that only older GPU architectures can run, using older OSes, to complete the benchmark successfully. The new world record, recorded on Sunday by Overclocker Rauf, stands at a 253,975 marks, as validated by HWBot.
Rauf used an Intel Core i9 12900K with eight P-cores active, on an Asus ROG Maximus Z690 Apex motherboard, with DDR5 RAM, to grab this world record. The GPU behind his success was an Asus GeForce GTX 980 Ti Matrix Platinum Edition.
Interestingly, the CPU was cooled using LN2 and running at 7,125 MHz, but the GPU was air cooled. In the photo you can see that the GPU is covered in paper towel to prevent condensation from the CPU pot affecting or damaging it.
We have covered some other interesting benchmark and overclocking world records recently. Certain new Intel Alder Lake motherboards have a feature where users can unlock BCLK, which has inspired a flood of new records using chips you can't usually overclock, such as value-orientated Core i5, i3, Pentium and even Celeron CPUs.
