Corsair Blog

Combining fast products like the Corsair Force Series Solid-State Drives and the Dominator® GTX2 DDR3 memory modules makes building a fast PC relatively easy. To demonstrate just how fast our products are, we decided to go after the PCMark Vantage world record. This benchmark heavily stresses the entire system, not just the CPU and GPU like the 3DMark Series. With PCMark Vantage the memory and SSDs are stressed just as much if not more than the CPU and GPU, with almost all of the individual benchmark tests taking advantage of the fast solid-state drives. Let’s take a look into how we accomplished our goal:

Using eleven Force Series F200 solid-state drives and the Corsair Dominator GTX2 DDR3 memory modules the record was set to 32,947 PCMarks. The system contained the brand new Intel® Core™ i7-980X six-core processor cooled with liquid nitrogen on the EVGA® X58 Classified. This combination would allow the CPU frequency upwards of 5.5GHz and memory clocks of 2000MHz+. The drives were combined into a Raid 0 on the Areca® ARC-1680D-IX-12 PCI-E RAID controller. The entire system was powered by the Corsair Professional Series HX1000 power supply.

The complete list of components used in the record-breaking Corsair PC can be seen below:

• 11 x Corsair Force Series F200 SSDs
• 6GB Corsair Dominator GTX2 DDR3 @ 2144MHz
• Corsair Professional Series HX1000W power supply
• Intel Core i7-980X processor
• ATI Radeon™ HD 5870 graphics card
• EVGA X58 Classified motherboard
• Kinpin CoolingF1EE Liquid Nitrogen pot
• Areca ARC-1680D-IX-12 PCI-E RAID card

The processor was then cooled to a temperature of -100C using a Kingpin Cooling Dragon F1EE liquid nitrogen pot. After several hours of testing the CPU frequency started climbing from 5.3GHz to 5.6GHz, 5.7GHz and finally 5.79GHz. The -100C temperature was necessary to run the processor at these clock speeds. With a base clock of 214.5MHz and the 2:10 memory divider the memory frequency was running at 2144MHz with latencies of 7-7-6-20. The ATI Radeon™ HD 5870 was also overclocked with a core frequency of 900MHz and a memory frequency of 1225MHz.

Click to see the full size image

The combination of the eleven Force Series F200 SSDs and the heavily overclocked system easily beat the previous World Record. Full details of our world record run can be seen on Futuremark’s Orb.

See a full list of PC Mark Vantage scores (with Corsair at the top) here.