A German overclocker has broken the clock speed record for graphics cards, pushing a souped-up AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT GPU past 3.2GHz.
Der Bauer, a big name in the overclocking community, replaced the water-cooling system on a PowerColor LiquidDevil Ultimate graphics card – which bypasses the artificial 3.0GHz clock limit on the RX 6900 XT for a maximum clock speed of 4.0GHz – with a liquid nitrogen-based cooling system that pushed the card’s temperature below zero.
Combined with a custom BIOS, Der Bauer was able to achieve a speed of 3225MHz from the card for a split second before it crashed due to cracked thermal paste – the liquid nitrogen cooling system had at that point reached colder than -129 degrees Celsius.
Of the record, Der Bauer said, “It’s what I expected from the 6900 XT in the first place, but then AMD started to have this artificial clock limit, which never made sense.
“Those cards have enormous potential, at least for extreme overclocking,” he said.
AMD’s new Big Navi Radeon 6000-series cards, as well as Nvidia’s Ampere RTX 30-series cards, are expected to be in short supply and high demand at least for the rest of this year.
