EVGA’s RTX 3090 GPU blows away rivals with a record-breaking 2.58GHz overclock

EVGA RTX 3090 Kingpin
(Image credit: EVGA)

Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3090 has just launched, and the new fastest GPU for gamers – targeted at ‘extreme’ enthusiasts and 8K gaming – has unsurprisingly blown away the existing record for 3DMark’s Port Royal benchmark.

One of EVGA’s RTX 3090 graphics cards was overclocked by Vince ‘Kingpin’ Lucido to a clock speed of 2,580MHz (using liquid nitrogen cooling) with the memory pushed to 21.5Gbps (just over 10% faster than normal) to record a huge score of 16,673.

The EVGA card in question was the RTX 3090 Kingpin edition to be precise, which isn’t yet available, but apparently the GPU maker will be getting it onto shelves quicker than has happened with previous Kingpin models, as Tom’s Hardware reports.

Royal result

As mentioned, that’s a new world record for the Port Royal benchmark, and it’s 2,000 points clear of the next highest score in fact, which is also an RTX 3090. As expected, it blows away the RTX 3080 which grabbed the top spot briefly after launch, with Ronaldo Buassali’s efforts (Galax’s in-house overclocker) which hit a still impressive 14,131 (with a 2.43GHz overclock, slightly faster than his initial 2.34GHz effort).

The fastest result from the last-generation Nvidia GPUs using the RTX 2080 Ti stands at 13,090, in case you were wondering.

Kingpin used liquid nitrogen cooling with the GPU and a water-cooled Intel Core i9-10900K, not to mention a 2,000W EVGA PSU – the RTX 3090 Kingpin graphics card will come with three 8-pin power connectors, by the way.

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).