Gigabyte’s Open Overclocking Championship 2008

Extreme preparation
You can’t get record-setting benchmark scores with basic gear, so contestants brought along plenty of their own goodies.

Team Singapore used a spray-on clearcoat to waterproof the back of the motherboard…

The first task teams undertook was to prepare their fresh hardware for the harsh conditions of below-freezing temperatures by waterproofing any piece of electrically conductive material with whatever means available.

…while a few teams used nail polish

A huge range of methods were employed, including spray-on aerosols, self-adhesive rubber foams, Vaseline and silicone grease, nail polish, and even putties and poster tack.

A couple of teams used putty for waterproofing the front…

Care had to be taken not to disrupt components that have to remain clear of insulation for the system to operate, and some teams came better prepared than others for a quicker dressing of their hardware. Among my favorites was team USA-1’s technique of bringing a pre-fitted foam sheet with cutouts for each large motherboard component.

…and one busted out good ‘ole petroleum jelly

Putty seemed to take the most time to apply, and while the pre-fitted foam sheet was generally the fastest method used, most teams did alright with one of the grease solutions or a combination of techniques.

Most teams started dressing the GPUs before they even booted their system…

The Radeons were given just as much attention, with similar materials used to shield the area around the GPU socket while keeping the core and memory clear for contact with the graphics cooler.

…but a couple booted everything on air to check their components out

In a move that I found safe but smart, some teams assembled their system as quickly as possible since time was such an issue, checking the hardware for any duds. Gigabyte allowed each team a single swap for each component in their system.

Behold, the copper tower of power

If there was a key component element to competition besides the hardware provided, it was the heatsink tube used to cool the processor. Every team used a tower (normally copper) to hold liquid nitrogen and transfer heat away from the processor to the frigid metal.

Team Hong Kong had a particularly large copper tower, pre-insulated to protect against excessive frost buildup

Masking tape evidently makes a decent masking material

To prepare chips for the insane heatsinks, insulation had to be carefully applied to maximize core contact while ensuring that condensation didn’t short the electronics.

I enjoyed the sheer size of the industrial-looking mounting systems.

You can’t hold a few pounds of copper to a motherboard safely with a standard retention mechanism, so each tower came with its own customized mounting hardware, ranging from six-inch bolts to woodworking bar clamps.

When bolts just won’t cut it—time to get out the bar clamp.

Teams weren’t as picky as you might expect when it came to thermal interface compounds. When asked why they weren’t using a well-known product such as Arctic Silver, most said that at these temperatures, the one-to-two degree advantage provided by more exotic compounds isn’t worth the additional cost considering just how much compound teams go through in an average overclocking session. That makes sense to me.

A good number of teams used run-of-the-mill ceramic compound for processor paste.

It’s a brute-force approach to cooling, but one can’t deny the results that can be obtained by almost directly exposing a processor to an extremely cool liquid.

Surprisingly few people took off the stock chipset cooler

As for cooling the north bridge chip, I was surprised to see that most teams left the stock cooler in place and just directed huge amounts of air at it. When asked about this, most contestants informed me that the cooling effect of liquid nitrogen on the CPU tends to keep the north bridge relatively cool as well. That wasn’t good enough for some teams, though.

Team USA-2 used a substantial water cooling kit just to cool their chipset

While the majority of teams left the stock water block on the motherboard and just directed a fan or two at it, a couple put the stock cooler to use and hooked up a dedicated water cooling system. A few even removed the barbs completely and positioned their own liquid nitrogen-ready towers over the north bridge chip.

The Australians had LN2 on both their CPU and their north bridge chip

Voiding your warranty
In such an extreme environment, there isn’t any questioning potentially dangerous enhancements like voltage modding—it’s a given part of the competition.

Team USA-1 got out the hot glue gun and soldering equipment right away

Graphics card makers keep power regulation on a tight leash, but if you can create a short in the right place on the circuit board and insert a relatively low impedance resistor in the new circuit path, you can safely deliver higher voltages to the GPU, allowing for higher clock speeds.

Basic printouts were actually quite rare

Each team went about voltage modding in similar ways; a soldering iron, some variable resistors and wires, and steady hands were pretty much all that was needed. More interesting was how the participants kept reference materials detailing the modifications.

An Acer Aspire One was used by one team…

All the teams used the same hack. Once one person in the community finds the proper points to short and valid loads to introduce to the new circuit, a high-resolution image of the surgery is all that is needed by anyone who wants to duplicate the mod.

A few used their smartphones

Part of the process involved checking the properties of the circuit before, during, and after the mod to ensure nothing went wrong. For this task everyone had their trusty digital multimeters ready, with some teams leaving probes permanently attached to the key points to monitor levels while everything was running.

Everyone had at least one multimeter handy to check their work

What really stood out about the modding was the fact that this was all taking place under the pressure of an extreme time crunch. Any time lost to a soldering snafu could mean the forfeit of a score in an event if the system could not be brought up to speed in time. It should come as no surprise, then, that the more experienced modders had a real advantage. They were practically professionals at working with the minute details of a voltage mod.

The points they had to solder were absolutely tiny

Some teams also employed a “droop” motherboard voltage hack.

Some teams went so far as to modify the motherboard, too

This warranty-voiding procedure let teams more finely control the stability of the voltage provided to the CPU. Some teams deemed this mod “only marginally beneficial,” but others declared it “essential” at the extreme clock speeds desired.

One of the soldering points on the mobo was on the front, directly to the right of the thumb

The motherboard mod took roughly as much skill as the graphics card one, but was a little trickier due to the fact that the solder points were on opposite sides of the circuit board.

The other point was on the back

My favorite part about these mods was the attention to detail some people were able to put into them in the short amount of time available. Cables were routed neatly to switches that could turn the mods on and off as demanded by some of the teams.

A variable resistor, conveniently placed

To ensure stability, other teams ran variable resistors that could be tuned once the machine was on.

Both American teams paid a great deal of attention to their mods, including team 2,
whose setup is pictured here

A couple teams were even watching current levels through ammeters, allowing them to cut power if too much current flow threatened to damage system components.

Trials and tribulation
When it came time for the official event to begin, the stage lit up again and the announcers detailed how the different stages would play out.

The announcers did a great job keeping the level high for all the spectators

There was also some time for executives from companies who had donated equipment to briefly talk about their work and support for events such as this one.

The sponsors underscored their support for the event

Of course, the competitors couldn’t be bothered to pay too much attention as they hurried to get equipment prepared for the first round of benchmarking.

Meanwhile, some teams were looking at this

As if system assembly and modification weren’t difficult enough, time constraints forced some teams to simplify their approaches in order to post scores in the first round.

Korea’s team didn’t get its GPU cooled by liquid nitrogen until a little later

By this time, most teams had setups at least ready to start, and the liquid nitrogen was flowing freely. Several members of Gigabyte’s staff worked almost non-stop filling insulated jugs with LN2 directly from the tanks.

Pouring liquid nitrogen makes for quite a show in itself

Although the primary goal of most contestants was to get the CPU as cold as possible, often times that pursuit caused an entirely different problem.

What’s a torch doing at an event all about getting things cold?

Due to what’s known as the “cold bug,” most CPUs will simply freeze up and stop working entirely if their temperatures plunge too low.

A creme brulée torch makes fine desserts and keeps your processor at an optimal temperature, too

The cold bug is especially tricky because you don’t know what temperature a processor will bottom out at until you hit it. Most teams that ran into this problem encountered it more than once when trying to pin down whether their systems were freezing because the processor wasn’t cold enough or because it was too cold.

Sweden took its sweet time applying adhesive foam in multiple layers

Some teams spent a lot more time prepping their hardware before diving into the software side of things.

Team USA-2 was cruising along pretty nicely considering all the work they did on their equipment

For those teams who weren’t as far along, the time was running out to get their systems up and running.

Team USA-1 was particularly short on time

The pre-fitted foam team USA-1 brought wasn’t enough to counteract the time it took to perform all their intensive mods.

Energy in a can

It would have been easy to slow down at this point, considering the discouraging feeling that comes from not being sure if you’ll have everything ready on time, but an abundance of Red Bull helped to keep everyone going.

The P45 event — rounds one and two
Gigabyte had intended to enforce a clear-cut line between the time allocated for system setup and preparation for the first round of testing, but that line quickly blurred as teams scrambled to get their systems to boot.

Team USA-2 won the award for the most chaotic workbench, in my humble opinion

Say hi to the judging table

The setup for recording high scores and keeping everything updated was pretty slick. Judges ran back and forth from the main table to the teams who had just posted their highest score, signaled by a raised hand from one of the participants. Once a screenshot was taken, the officials would record the score on a master Excel spreadsheet that was displayed for all in the conference room to see.

The scoreboard

In addition to the scores, a countdown timer kept teams on edge by providing a constant reminder of how much time was left until the end of the round.

South Africa’s setup was ambitious, but software problems kept slowing them down.

Problems including unstable operating system settings and driver issues plagued some contestants, who struggled even to get a stable system at conservative clock speeds.

Team Russia and the main gotcha of the event—the fans had to stay connected on both GPUs

Some folks discovered much sooner than others that the Radeon 4870 drivers didn’t like it if the graphics card’s fan was disconnected. Everything would start up as usual, but a hard blue screen of death awaited most once Windows loaded driver files.

“Everything looks good. Why are we still crashing?”

Getting a high bandwidth/read score in Everest was the first competition, and although team USA-1 actually had everything almost ready to go by the time some teams were turning in their scores, they still faced stability issues due to the GPU fan driver bug.

Hong Kong (pictured) and Japan used the same clamp to hold the heatsink tower down securely

Team Hong Kong won the first round with 11,578 points in the Everest benchmark. Turkey placed second, only eight points behind, with China-1 in third with a score of 11,301, Sweden-1 in fourth with 10,974, and China-2 in fifth with 10,611.

Indonesia’s team was in first place for most of the second round with a tower on their CPU and north bridge

For the second round, contestants had to compute Pi with SuperPI configured with the 1M setting.

Computing Pi at 5,569MHz

At these obscene speeds—most well above five gigahertz—calculating Pi to a million places only took between eight and 10 seconds.

Team Sweden-2 came late to the party but brought plenty of LN2 with them

Although Indonesia, Hong Kong, and a few others got great results right away, other teams took time to perfect their setups and started posting scores with only minutes left in the round.

Sweden and Russia pulled ahead at literally the last minute

Sweden-2 pushed their CPU to an amazing 5.6GHz, capturing the best time of 8.172 seconds. Singapore scored second with 8.187s, Russia third with 8.188s, Indonesia fourth with 8.250s, and France fifth with 8.266s.

The P45 event — rounds three and four
You might think teams would get a break before starting a completely different set of benchmarks, but the 3DMark 2001 test was up next, and teams only had an hour to prepare for it, just like in previous rounds.

Team Singapore had a relatively clean setup, all things considered

Without a real break yet, it was a wonder more teams weren’t slowing down by the third round, especially considering that most had traveled across the world for the event.

Live DJs helped motivate everyone to work a little faster

A rotation of live DJs kept spirits up, along with the constant commentary from the MCs and prodding from journalists who wanted some more details on what each team was doing.

Darth Vader even made an appearance for some reason

Food was provided, but most contestants didn’t have time to socialize while they ate. Most brought refreshments back to their workstations, where it sat next to the same substances used to keep their systems running.

I was a little worried someone might end up drinking some liquid nitrogen at times

I didn’t hear any reports of someone drinking liquid nitrogen by accident, but plenty of teams did the opposite, using their re-shaped Red Bull cans or water bottles as funnels to help pour coolant.

Upside-down water bottles cut in half made pretty nice funnels for team USA-1

Team USA-1’s ingenuity started to pay off in the second round, as they got some frosty temperatures and outstanding clock speeds from their Radeons.

You know a heatsink is keeping a GPU cold when…

Most teams had heavy insulation on the back of their GPUs, discouraging condensation and frost buildup. However, for the teams who simply used some grease or thin clearcoat, this wasn’t all that uncommon of a sight.

Most teams, like China-2 here, watched the temps of both GPUs and the CPU all at once

3DMark success came down to not only who had the highest overclock, but also who was able to tweak his system effectively.

More teams had working setups by this late into the competition

The top place exchanged hands many times during the hour of testing for rounds three and four, but USA-1, Sweden-2, and Russia pulled ahead by a decent margin in the last five minutes.

A screenshot of the winning score in 3DMark 2001 by team USA-1

In the end, an extremely good CPU overclock and a moderate GPU overclock reigned supreme, as team USA-1 captured first place with 103,303 3DMarks. Sweden-2 wasn’t far behind with 102,445 3DMarks, with Russia trailing in third with a score of 101,639 and Italy in fourth with 101,028 3DMarks.

3DMark 2006 with some registry tweaks by team Sweden-2

3DMark 2006 benefited from largely the same hardware tweaks as 3DMark 2001, but knowledge of specific driver and registry settings helped some teams get ahead. Higher clock speeds are only one part of the equation in 3DMark; one can improve scores by tweaking registry settings to bring the level of detail in the benchmark way down.

Team USA-2’s setup looked very fierce (and rather patriotic, I might add)

Team USA-2 found this out the hard way, and consistently came up short of the scores posted by Sweden-2, despite that team running a lower GPU clock. There was a bit of discussion on the subject, and eventually it was agreed that Sweden’s higher CPU clock speed and reduced level of detail did more for the 3DMark score than USA-2’s higher GPU clock.

Things were chilly indeed during the 3DMark benchmarking

In round four, team Sweden-2 took top honors with 29,630 points in 3DMark 2006. USA-2’s 29,463 3DMarks was good enough for second place, while France scored bronze with 28,481 3DMarks, followed by Indonesia in fourth with 28,231.