| ||
| by MAC | October 2, 2008 | ||
| Schedule/Guidelines Schedule/Guidelines Schedule Although many of the competitors (and reporters) had only arrived in Taiwan the night prior, there was no rest for the weary as the breakfast/morning buffet started at 6:30A.M and the schedule for the day was packed:  8:00AM to 7:30PM is a grueling schedule, especially when one has to focus on tinkering and tweaking hardware and software settings, and it was definitely possible that mental exhaustion would come into play in the later hours of the day. Guidelines Competition I: Battle for the Best P45 OC For the first part of the competition, Gigabyte provided the following hardware configuration: Aside from the engineering sample processor, the rest of the configuration was comprised of components that you can easily find at your favourite online retailer. Windows XP SP2 was preloaded on the VelociRaptor, along with the Catalyst 8.8 (67975) graphics driver and all the necessary benchmarking programs and tweaking tools. For the full list of preloaded software, please visit the GOOC 2008 website. The rules for this first competition were quite simple:
Points were awarded based on the results of each benchmarking round. The Top 5 teams in each of the four benching rounds would be awarded points, except in 3DMark 2001 & 06 where only the Top 4 would receive points. The competitors had to do a printscreen, save the results on their USB thumb drive, and raise their hand to submit a score. Gigabyte judges would then verify and add the score to the live database. Naturally, the team with the highest point total at the end of the four rounds would be declared the winner. In case of a tie, the team with the highest 3DMark06 score would be the winner. 
In a competition of this caliber, competing for bragging rights would almost be enough, but Gigabyte sweetened the deal with some good old fashioned cash incentives:
They even had bonus prizes: Competition II: Freestyle Contest The second half of the competition would be the Freestyle Contest, which would allow the competitors to show off their skills using a hardware configuration of their choosing. However, there were a few basic requirements: The objective for the Freestyle Contest was easy, break as many world records in as many benchmark and individual hardware categories as possible in the alloted 2 hours. The qualifying benchmarking programs were 3DMark 2001/03/05/06/Vantage, PCMark 04/05/Vantage, Aquamark 3, SuperPI, wPrime, PiFast, and even CPU-Z validation. Effectively, anything that was recognized on hwbot.org could be used. The teams with the highest record breaking score in each respective category would be awarded 1 point. At the end of the Freestyle Contest, the team with the most points would be the winner. In the case of a tie, the team who broke a world record by the largest margin would be declared the winner.
Simple enough? Well then let us move on to the actual Competition Day... | ||
| |
| Latest Reviews in Articles | |||||||||
|
