Conclusion
First of all I have to say after
two hours of benching right next to an open windows without gloves, writing has
become something quite painful. Especially the fingers on my right hand (the
hand which is closer to the window) hurt badly which is why I can imagine nicer
things then writing an article when benching next to an open window and zero
degree outside temperature. I'm qutite sure, in case I get sick this week-end my
girlfriend will not like it.
Ok, but we benchers we're man, so let's stop whining about and step to the
conclusion. In this case especially the triple SLI setup has been able to take
advantage from the colder temperatures. The CPU we used didn't scale well. It
became to hot anyway. But fortunately the cards could be overclocked a bit higher.
At 22°C room temperature they were maxed out at 852 MHz and 1.138 Volt. Opening
the window made it possible to run the benchmarks at 952 MHz on the cores of all
cards. To do so they needed 1.175 Volt. Quite a nice result I think, for
reference cards in a triple SLI configuration.
In the end we could manage a
3DMark 11 score that is 18 Percent higher than the standard score. So, we think
it was ok to sit in the freezing cold for two hours.
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