It’s common knowledge that a higher fps (frames-per-second) confers a competitive advantage in video games. However, one YouTube overclocker may have taken that ethos too far with his latest video. Der8auer, an overclocking expert, has used some of the top hardware in PC gaming right now to hit a ludicrous 1,000 fps in Counter-Strike 2.
This is, quite frankly, overkill. But that didn’t stop Der8auer, who used the Intel Core i9-14900K, Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090, and a whole lot of liquid nitrogen to achieve this goal. Incredibly, Der8auer admits he could have taken this rig to even higher extremes, but stopped because of some limitations he had placed on this experiment before it began.
The original goal wasn’t to get as high an fps as possible, instead it was to test what sort of heights could be achieved by the average competitive Counter-Strike 2 competitive player, using specifically those settings favored by professional eSports players. As such, these tests were not taken with graphical settings ratcheted as far down as they could go, as certain graphical settings are understood to confer an advantage for CS2 pros — for instance, shadow quality at high takes a toll on the GPU, but allows for easier visibility of enemy players. Turning these options down would have allowed for an even higher fps, but this would not have been an accurate reflection of a CS2 pro’s experience.
After hitting a relatively paltry 800 fps and 6 GHz using an AIO liquid cooler in his first tests, Der8auer attached the LN2 liquid nitrogen cooler, pushing rig temperatures down to a frosty -150 Celsius, and allowing for a clock speed of 7.4 GHz and an average of 950 fps. It was only after swapping the standard Intel Core i9-14900K for one available from the Asus OC lab that a consistent fps of above 1,000 was achieved.
This isn’t even close to the highest fps we’ve heard of testers achieving in CS2, with a Core i9-14900K hitting 1,310 fps in October of this year. It’s likely that fps wasn’t hit with the limitations Der8auer placed on himself, helping prove his statement that higher frame rates were definitely possible for his rig.