In news only nerds like me will care about (which is pretty much my raison d'être at this point), the world record for the highest 3DMark Port Royal score has been smashed. Shattered. Thrown into the mud. Soundly beaten.
Okay, so it's not by a huge amount over the previous record. But the new top score on HWBot is a massive 51,663 marks, and was achieved by user Cmaker. Take a bow, you king of overclockers. I kneel at your ability to make a large number go higher than everyone else.
In all seriousness, Cmaker's rig is something to behold. The score was achieved using an MSI RTX 5090 32G Lightning Z, a limited-edition extreme graphics card priced at $5,000+ upon release—and for god knows how much if you can find one today. It was also cooled with liquid nitrogen to achieve a top clock speed of 3,623 MHz, 848 MHz higher than the already-massive max "default" speed of 2,775 MHz.
As you would imagine, the rest of Cmaker's rig is suitably extreme to match. The CPU is the venerable Intel Core i9 14900KF (water cooled, of course), the 32 GB of Corsair Vengeance DDR5 has also had a dose of liquid nitrogen cooling, and the power supply is a 1,500 W Corsair unit.
Looking at the photos, it seems Cmaker has milled a custom cooling block for the RTX 5090 themselves, and surrounded the GPU and the motherboard with a smattering of fans. It's not the most put together gaming PC I've ever seen, but this sort of setup is par for the course when it comes to the world of extreme overclocking.
For reference, our stock RTX 5090 FE sample managed a score of 36,389 in Port Royal, while the ludicrously expensive MSI RTX 5090 Suprim SOC topped out at 38,715. All it takes is an even more expensive RTX 5090 variant, some liquid nitrogen, a milling machine, and some talent, ey? If only we'd known.
But how long until the record is broken again? Come on, I know someone reading must have an even more extreme setup than this one—or at the very least, the resources required to put one together. I shall sit here and watch, because this sort of high-wire act with very expensive components makes my teeth hurt. Good stuff, though. Got any spare change?
1. Best overall: AMD Radeon RX 9070
2. Best value: AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT 16 GB
3. Best budget: Nvidia RTX 5050
4. Best mid-range: AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT
5. Best high-end: Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090
