In March 2005, the overclocking world then centered around XtremeSystems had its eyes on Texas. At the Texas Gaming Festival 2005 in Dallas, Texas, ATI (now AMD) launched their top of the line Radeon X850XT 512MB graphics card. And even back then, hardware manufacturers realized that the best way to demonstrate the performance and product quality of computer hardware is to have extreme overclockers take it for a spin.

Armed with liquid nitrogen, three of the world's best overclockers of that era took on the challenge of the Futuremark ORB. Macci, the legendary Finnish overclocker who later went on to work for ATI and AMD, faced OPPainter and Fugger from the United States. OPPainter is a name many of the young generation of overclockers are most likely not familiar with, but Fugger is still actively overclocking as we could see at IDF'15. According to the event coverage by AnandTech, the overclockers from back in the day struggled with the same problems we struggle with today: live events are not easy.

Even though the trio was set out to smash 3DMark01, 03, and 05 World Records, the event day finished with no records broken. The hardware of the event included of course the X850XT at clock rates up to 850 MHz core frequency and 700 MHz memory frequency, as well as the AMD FX-55 at speeds close to 4 GHz. Nice tidbit: Macci still holds the title of fastest GPU frequency for an X800 series graphics card at HWBOT. The 3DMark05 result submitted on the 13th of August, 2006(!) features an X850XT PE at 904MHz GPU Frequency!

For more throwback thursday coverage, check out the threads and articles at: XtremeSystems, auphanonline.com, and TechReport.