Event Report

GIGABYTE Open Overclocking Championship 2008

Introduction

On September 25th, Gigabyte hosted a who’s who of international overclockers for the first (hopefully annual) Gigabyte Open Overclocking Championship 2008 in the heartland of computer hardware - Taipei, Taiwan. Hardware Canucks was one of a few fortunate media organizations to be invited to report on the event, and we are pleased to be able to bring you a chronicle of this unprecedented competition. If a picture is worth 1,000 words then this article is about 130,000 words long, and we hope that it gives you a one of a kind look at how the event unfolded.

Now just in case this is the first time that you have heard of the Gigabyte Open Overclocking Championship 2008 (GO OC 2008), which means that you missed the intense buzz over the event in every noteworthy enthusiast forum on the internet, and also missed the fast-paced live blogcast on the GO OC 2008 website, let’s do a quick background story.

The Gigabyte Open Overclocking Championship 2008 is the final event in a series of worldwide overclocking competitions that were held all over the world. These 11 regional qualifying events began in Indonesia on June 14-15 2008, gathered steam in the U.S.A on June 28th, and finished up in Japan on September 5th. Now some countries were not able to host their own regional events, but in many cases the choice was obvious, Hipro5 for Greece, Harshal for India, Giorgioprimo for Italy, etc. In the end, competitors from 25 countries qualified for the final event, specifically Australia, Belgium, China, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Iran, Italy, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, New Zealand, Russia, Singapore, South Africa, Sweden, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, U.S.A and Vietnam. Regrettably, as is often the case when organizing such a large event, some people could not attend the September 25th final, so the championship was deprived of Team Germany and Team Greece.


Nevertheless, despite drop-outs, visa issues, typhoon-related flight delays and more, we ended up with a very sizeable group of world-renowned overclockers, all eager and willing to put their skills on display. No matter if you were a competitor or a reporter, seeing this much talent in one place for the first time ever was quite exciting.

So who exactly was there? Well here is a list of the competitors for your convenience:


If you are a member of any enthusiast forum, such as XtremeSystems, or visit the hwbot.org website, then these usernames should already be familiar to you. There certainly were no undeserving competitors at this event, so we all expected some impressive achievements. Did they deliver? Keep reading!