Back in the year 2000, which was a milestone year by itself, microprocessor designers managed to make their chips work at over 1GHz clock-rate. Five years later enthusiasts have managed to achieve the same speeds at the graphics processing unit (GPU). While the achievement means nothing to end-users since overclockers only managed to run the product in 2D mode, it demonstrates potential  of ATI’s latest architecture.

“It’s impressive to see the RADEON X1800 XT architecture achieve 1GHz core speed and approach 2GHz memory speed, which far exceeds the specifications of the memory devices,” said Stan Ossias, senior product manager, desktop products, ATI Technologies.

Finnish overclockers Sampsa Kurri and Ville Suvanto achieved graphics engine clocks of 1.003GHz and a memory speed of 1.881GHz with maximum system stability and no visual artifacts in 2D mode. The product is not reportedly capable of running any 3D applications, but the overclockers are looking forward to make the RADEON X1800 XT product work in popular benchmarks, such as Futuremark’s 3DMark.

To date, the highest 3DMark05 score for a single graphica card is 12419, which was achieved on the RADEON X1800 XT graphics card operating at 882MHz for the GPU and 1953MHz for the memory.

Record-breaking by Finnish overclockers is conducted with liquid nitrogen which temperature is -196 degrees Celsius.

RADEON X1800 XT’s extreme clock-scaling capabilities are made possible by a series of innovations that include use of the 90nm semiconductor process technology, a new  Ring-bus memory controller and some other.