The vaulted XTU 742 club is no more after Aussie overclocker zeropluszero smashed the record with a score of (cue expectant drum rolls…), yes you guessed it, 743 points. Ok, so what’ the big deal? Well, first a little back story, just in case you missed the last installment.

The Global 1st place ranking for a dual-core CPU in the Intel XTU benchmark was (until earlier today) exactly 742 points. The score was first achieved by another Aussie overclocker known as sskmercer back in February who hit the 742 score using an Intel Core i3 6320, and most notably an ASRock Z170 OC Formula motherboard. Subsequent attempts to surpass the record failed. What made the whole thing rather odd however is the fact that the only overclockers who could reach and equal the 742 points score were all using an ASRock Z170 OC Formula board. Somehow, no other board could reach this landmark score. Fast forward a few months and more than 60 overclockers were sat on 742 points – all of them using the ASRock board.

Enter GIGABYTE and Sofos1990 who took a GIGABYTE Z170X-SOC Force LN2 motherboard (a board of mythical status seeing as it was never released to the retail channel) and managed to become the first overclocker to hit 742 points with a dual-core chip in XTU with a non-ASRock board. Kudos to GIGABYTE for matching ASRock and working out how to squeeze that last drop of performance from the i3 6320 chip.

Today you could argue that GIGABYTE have now gone one better as zeropluszero has now broken the 742 barrier and hit a score of 743 points using a Z170X-SOC Force LN2 board. Jesus wept. No more XTU 742 club. Zeropluszero pushed his i3 6320 processor to 4GHz (+2.56%) along with his G.SKILL Ripjaws V configured at 1,922MHz (12-12-12-28 1T).

Check out the submission from zeropluszero here, plus all dual-core XTU rankings here on HWBOT.