Reloaded LAN, Adelaide, 26th – 27th January 2008

Atomic's breaking records again, this time at Adelaide's biggest gaming event.

Over the Australia Day long weekend, Adelaide played host to one of Australia’s largest LAN gaming events: Reloaded LAN.

The LAN featured competitions for many games including Counter Strike: Source, Wii Sports and Halo 3. The event covered every facet of today’s gaming scene, with console and PC gaming well-represented both in numbers, quality of players and game coverage.

With a turnout of over 500 people to this massive event, Reloaded LAN also hosted stalls for local and national IT companies.

New tech was being demonstrated throughout the event both at vendor booths and in the systems of the event competitors. Additionally, for the sake of the new tech, Team Australia was on hand to demonstrate the limits of some of the finest current and upcoming pieces of kit. Representing Team.AU were members James ‘pro’ Trevaskis and Atomic’s Josh ‘moloko’ Collins.

The platform to be given the treatment was very shiny. It was comprised of the yet to be released Gigabyte GA-X48T-DQ6 (based on Intel’s upcoming X48 chipset) paired with a choice of one of two available Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 processors. A kit of Corsair Dominator DDR3-1800 C7 memory, Gigabyte Nvidia 8800GTS 512MB graphics cards and an Antec Quattro 1000W power supply later, the sub-zero prepared machine was ready to be overclocked until it wept.



With the liquid nitrogen on hand, the duo set out on an overclocking war path, with huge 3DMark results the spoils of war.

With pre-testing done on the Friday afternoon with 10L of liquid nitrogen, the Team.AU boys were feeling quietly confident. The two QX9650 displayed different overclocking characteristics, but this was to be expected as the chips were sourced from different batches.

Moloko’s chip happily booted from -120 degrees C, and once in the OS demonstrated a tolerance for the cold down to -140 degrees C before succumbing to the cold bug and locking up. Before that the chip was happily trotting along at 5.3GHz. Pro’s chip, however, was happy to bench at a slightly higher 5.4GHz, but had a hotter cold boot bug of -96 degrees C and a maximum threshold of -110’C.

After two days of benching, new Australian records had been set and top international placeholders challenged. What were the final results, you ask?

3DMark01: 106.2k
3DMark05: 31.3k
3DMark06: 22.4k
Aquamark 3: 307k

Thanks to Gigabyte, Corsair and Antec for helping make this event possible and their support of the enthusiast scene.