Event Report: GIGABYTE Open Overclocking Championship 2009

Preparation Day Continued

Here we see Team USA 1's graphics cards after being sprayed with Plastik 70 conformal coating, which is an acrylic resin that has fantastic insulating properties. The downside is that it emits some vicious vapors, but in a very humid environment like Taiwan it is really a must-use on all PCB surfaces.


Here we see Team USA 2 trying to troubleshoot their non-booting system. A tear down would later reveal that their motherboard was faulty.


Given Team USA 2's problems, Team Belgium was the third team to have a booting system. In the mean time, Elmor and SF3D were still in the process of modifying and preparing their hardware.


Team Australia had a great pre-cut self-adhesive piece of insulation that covered the whole back of the motherboard.


By the three-hour mark all the team's had a functioning system, and they were all focusing exclusively on SuperPI in order to stress test their 5 CPUs.


Slowly but surely, it became clear that this particular processor batch averaged in the 5.3Ghz range, give or take.


Being able to save profiles in the UD5's BIOS was a huge time-saver, and it was used by the all the teams.


This is a good action shot as just when Miahallen looked away, the system BSOD'ed.


When you've got a nearly unlimited supply of liquid nitrogen at your disposal, chilling beer is a matter of 1-2-3 as demonstrated by miahallen.


Team Australia seemed to have a good processor capable of around 5.44Ghz, but...


...Team Belgium had an even better 5.6Ghz chip, and just for the heck of it they tried to boot at 6Ghz! It booted briefly, but crashed milliseconds after this picture was taken.


Team Australia's main issue was that for some reason hyper-threading would not disable, no matter what was selected in the BIOS. With Hyper-threading enabled, processors run a good deal hotter, and HT is useless for single-threaded apps like SuperPI, so disabling it was a priority.


Despite their initial motherboard issues, Team USA 2 were binning their processors at an impressive rate, and they actually managed to test 4 of them on prep day.


Here have Trouffman of Overclocking-TV (responsible for the live feeds everyone enjoys so much) swimming in Deanzo's LN2 mist, along with special guest RDRASH who competed in the North American regional finals and was also present during GO OC 2008.


Team Belgium's Dragon F1 frosting over.


In order to 3D bench their processors, Team Sweden used 3DMark06 instead of 3DMark Vantage since it doesn't take as long to run. For his part, Team China's x800pro is so hardcore that he LN2 cools components that aren't even plugged into a system!


Once Team Australia reflashed the BIOS, the hyper-threading issue disappeared, and they were finally able to properly bench and tweak their system.


Most of the teams were so busy binning CPUs and running SuperPI that they didn't even have a chance to ensure that their graphics cards were functional, much less good overclockers.


As the preparation day came to a close, it was time for all the teams to disassemble and dry their systems.


There was a couple of dead and/or moist components here & there, but the overall damage for the day was minimal. Would the competitors be as hardware-friendly tomorrow? Doubtful.


It was interesting/funny to see $1000 'rejects' lying around everywhere. Team USA 1 lapped their best processor, which is something that all teams were allowed to do, but few were equipped to do.


Once their systems were torn down and dried, each team was given a box to place their components into, and then the preparation day was over.