Event Report: GIGABYTE Open Overclocking Championship 2008

Competition II: Freestyle Contest

Following the Battle for the Best P45 OC competition it was time for the 4-hour Freestyle Contest, and during the 30 minute set-up period most teams had disassembled their previous systems.


As a result, there was about $30,000-50,000 worth of high-end hardware laying around everywhere, including the floor, which made walking around interesting for those of us looking through a camera lens.


Team France took a low-end approach to the Freestyle event by bringing a Gigabyte HD 2400XT graphics card. This was a perfectly legitimate approach as the rules stated that competitors could aim to break individual hardware records, as long as the hardware was not too old. On the other hand, Team Australia aimed high by bringing two Radeon HD 4870 X2's. Aside from the power supply, all the other hardware they used in the Freestyle contest had been brought by them; Core 2 Duo E8600, Corsair Dominator PC3-14400 DDR3 modules, dual HD 4870 X2's, and Deanzo's prized EP45T-EXTREME motherboard, which was benchable up to the mid-600Mhz FSB mark. All the elements were there for some impressive results.


Team Vietnam broke the first world record, a CPU-Z validation shot of their E6550 at 4713Mhz. A few minutes later they posted the highest SuperPI 1M result with an E6550, and then set a wPrime 32M record with their E6550. Three new world records in the span of 10 minutes, this was starting out very well indeed.


By this point there was a small crowd gathered around the table of Team USA 2 (FUGGER & Vapor). They had brought a Core 2 Extreme QX9770 and Core 2 Duo E8600, as well as a stock Radeon HD 4870 X2. All very high-end components, but their secret weapons could be seen on the right hand corner of their table...


...Early samples of the now commercially available Intel X25-M 80GB SATA-II solid state drive. If you have read any reviews of this 'mainstream' product, Intel will be releasing enthusiast models as well, then you know that they are currently the fastest SSDs on the market. With a QX9770 running at 5.0-5.2Ghz and two blazing SSDs in RAID-0 it was obvious that they would succeed at setting new records in the various PCMark benchmarking suites. And they did, effectively doubling the previous PCMark04 record achieved with a QX9770.


The new record was so high (and so obscure) that Hicookie himself had to verify it on the hwbot and Futuremark websites. However, it was good, and then they set their sights on PCMark Vantage...where they set another QX9770 world record within 12 minutes. Later on they swapped the QX9770 for an E8600, and they set an overall PCMark04 world record and an E8600 PCMark Vantage record.


Here we see the combat-ready Zolkorn from Team Thailand running SuperPI. His team was regrettably out of commission for much of the event, first due to the No Fan = Reboot issue, then Windows corruption, and finally general instability. The South African team also had a wide variety of hardware and software issues, and they were unable to even attempt to break the HD 4850 records they were eyeing.


Team Sweden 2 had focused 100% of their energy on the Battle for the Best P45 OC, so they did not bring their own hardware, and instead tried to make due with the initial configuration. However, since their motherboard still had an issue were it shut down when not under load, there was not much they could do except loop SuperPI 32M. Team Australia once again experienced disaster, effectively killing Deanzo's motherboard. As a result, Dinos22 brought one of his HD 4870 X2's over to Team Singapore (NightRaven & T_M) to help them diagnose their own motherboard issues.


With 15 minutes left, many teams were still trying to break records, but the less fortunate teams had started the disassembly process. Here we see Team South Africa's huge CPU pot, which froze everything around it. And lastly we have one of the few P45 Express northbridges that survived, coated in Vaseline but still functional.


Team Vietnam was not even close to being done though, setting their sights on the Core 2 Duo E8200 SuperPI 1M world record which they eventually broke.