I have a 2600K running on an Asus Maximus IV Gene-Z/Gen3 motherboard and was wondering if its possible to use the Intel 3000 GPU to handle physx ? Not that its really needed, but would be interesting.
No, GPU PhysX acceleration is only supported on NVIDIA GeForce 8 series (and newer) video cards with at least 32 CUDA cores and 256MB of VRAM (i.e. 8600GT and above).
I understand how PhysX works. But without an nvidia card present, it uses the cpu to do the work if I understand correctly. If thats the case, wouldn't it be possible for someone to write a driver or hack physX to use the intel gpu to do the physx calculations?
The GPU accelerated PhysX engine works with CUDA, so unless your GPU supports CUDA, it's not possible. Needless to say Intel and AMD GPUs aren't supporting CUDA. The CPU PhysX engine doesn't have the features of the GPU accelerated one BTW. All the fancy effects are only available with a Nvidia GPU, that's all. Now go spit on Nvidia marketing crap.
This is off topic, but I noticed that your overclocks are ridiculous for your GPU and CPU. How are you getting 5.3 stable???? What are you benchmarking at with that setup?
It's rather common to get 2500k/2600k up to and beyond 5GHz. I've only pushed my 2500k to 4.9 stable (posted beyond 5GHz) but I've only got a rather poor Noctua DH12 cooling fan. With some modern stuff/water-block I should be able to go higher. As for the GPU, 1000MHz is common for 6970'ies.