This week’s trip down memory lane recalls a day back in December 2011 when we covered a story published by GeForce.com with James Wang conducting an interview with K|ngp|n (US), a HWBOT member that was making a name for himself as the world’s leading GPU pusher. Vince had just broken the 3DMark11 Extreme World Record using a 4-way SLI setup using some EVGA Classified GTX 580 cards and the latest X79 platform:

We heard you broke the world record for 3DMark11, again. What score did you achieve? What was former record?

KP: I was able to get a score of X12,554 in 3DMark 11X (Extreme preset) a few days ago during a lab test session trying to push the limits of 4-WAY SLI benching. The former 3d11X record on previous generation chipset(X58) that stood for over 1/2 a year was X11,474 which was done using EVGA CLASSIFIED SR-2 and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 and QUAD SLI technology. When X79 launched recently, that score was broken at around X12.2k. The newest score of X12,554 that was done was on EVGA’s new E779 X79 CLASSIFIED 4-Way SLI motherboard and EVGA’s CLASSIFIED GeForce GTX 580 ULTRA. This is the current top score in 3D11 Extreme. A push will be made for X13k though, so it probably won’t last too long.

What clock speed were you able to take the GPU and CPU?

Clockspeeds were about 5.3GHz for CPU and for GPU’s 1300MHz core frequency and 2400MHz memory frequency for GTX 580’s (4) in QUAD SLI.

The new record was made possible by some hardware advancements. What changed between your last rig and the latest rig? What made the biggest difference?

The new X79 Chipset on EVGA’s E779 CLASSIFIED motherboard helped as its quite powerful in 3DMark 11 particularly in last two tests (physics/combined). Because this is 3D11X (Extreme preset) which runs on higher resolution and it really is all about GPU power, the GTX 580 clocks were much more of a factor in getting the final score that I did. My previous 3D11X score was at 1200MHz core frequency on NVIDIA GTX 580 Reference cards in QUAD SLI. The new one is at 1300MHz.

Just for the sake of interest, the current World Record for 3DMark11 Extreme stands at 32,795 marks and was submitted by Gunslinger (US) who used a 4-way SLI setup with 4x GeForce GTX Titan X cards and a Intel Core i7 5960X 'Haswell-E' chip clocked at 5,471MHa (+83.37%).

Read the full interview with k|ngp|n here on GeForce.com. You can also find the original post from December 2nd 2012 and the comments that were made at the time right here.