Although Nvidia's Fermi-architecture and their GF100 card now shows up on the picture now and then, AMD is still the world's fastest GPU on the market. Looking at video cards with a single GPU, the Radeon 5870 is King of the Hill with AMD's Cypress chip clocked at 850MHz. Now, this poor 40 nanometer GPU pushed to near-1400MHz by industrious overclockers named Dean "Deanzo" Smith.

With the MSI Radeon HD 5870 graphics card and 150 liters of liquid nitrogen Deanzo managed to push clock speed limits on the card for quite unprecedented 1380MHz GPU and 1350MHz memory (5400MHz), compared with the original clock speed limits on 850MHz/1200MHz.

This impressive overclocking led to victory in an internal overclocking contest on Kingpincooling.com, but also a world record in 3DMark Vantage Performance, although the Core i7 processor's speed was limited to 4.75 GHz.

24,486 points landed the final result and the card was even close to ready a round through 3DMark with a 1.4 GHz GPU clock speed, but unfortunately there was too much pressure on the card, which packed in total after being fed with a voltage of the whole 1, 6V.

This is, after all evidence of the frequencies that are possible with the previous 40 nanometer technology and we look forward to the first cards that come with 1GHz clock speed of the standard version.