Over the weekend Japanese Extreme Overclocker NABE got down to some serious sub-zero overclocking. The session featured a Kaby-Lake-X processor from Intel which was pushed to new heights after being delidded with an LN2 pot mounted directly onto the CPU die. The outcome is a new World record in the classic 3DMark06 benchmark.

The 3DMark06 benchmark is, to put a fine point on things, a bit long in the tooth. Being more than a decade old means that the new GPUs don’t actually provide much of a boost in performance, so much that newer GPUs like Nvidia’s Pascal family can be run at stock settings and still produce decent scores. The best way of pushing the benchmark to new heights is in fact to use the fastest CPU you can get your hands on. This is one reason why Nabe opted to use the latest Kaby Lake-X processor, the Core i7 7740X. The i7 7740X may not have as many cores or threads as its Skylake-X brethren, but in core to core performance terms, it’s pretty hard to beat.

The new 3DMark06 World Record now stands at 71,966 marks. The score was made with NABE’s Core i7 7740X pushed to an incredible 7,127.8MHz, which is +65.76% beyond the chip’s stock settings. What makes the score and the CPU configuration more interesting is that Nabe opted to use delid his Kaby Lake-X chip, but instead of replacing the TIM ̶w̶i̶t̶h̶ ̶l̶i̶q̶u̶i̶d̶ ̶m̶e̶t̶a̶l̶ and re-attaching the IHS, he decided to mount the LN2 pot directly onto the CPU die itself. To make this happen he used an additional mounting mechanism that gives the LN2 pot solid contact with the CPU die (check out the image on the left).

Other rig details involve an ASUS ROG Rampage VI Apex board, a GALaX HoF GTX 1080 Ti LN GOC card plus GLALAX HoF DDR4 memory tuned to 2,075MHz (12-12-12-28). The score beats the previous best which was made last month during Computex by Team AU who scored 71,928 marks with a Core i7 7740X clocked at 7,100MHz (65.12%) Using a GIGABYTE X299 SOC Champion board.

You can find the new 3DMark06 World Record here as well as the overall 3DMark06 rankings right here. Congrats to NABE. Well done.