Event Report: GIGABYTE Open Overclocking Championship 2009

Competition Day - Warm-Up & Opening Ceremony

With the timer ticking, the team's now had to unpack their boxes, rebuild their systems, and test whatever components they had not had the chance to test the day before.


The team's generally took their time with the rebuild, taking extra care to ensure that their insulation was well done as possible to prevent any catastrophic, time wasting hardware failures. However, as you will see, whatever can go wrong usually does at these competitions.


For the competition day, GIGABYTE had professional whose sole task was filling thermos and resupplying everyone with liquid nitrogen. He proved quite popular with the public and invited guests, most of whom had obviously never seen liquid nitrogen being used in person.


Team Sweden and Team USA 2 were rocking the puppets for good luck.


Team USA 1 and Team China both had not tested their modified graphics cards during the preparation day, so that was priority #1 for both teams.


Team Australia had 4 CPUs left to test, so they had a fairly significant work load ahead of them.


Sno.lcn of Team USA 2 was focused on putting the finishing touches on the team's GeForce GTX 260's.


Luckily for Team USA 1 both graphics cards worked perfectly, so that was one huge potential hurdle avoided.


Likewise, Team China's cards were fully functional, so Lok put the finishing touches on the cards.


All the teams had rebuilt their systems, and everyone appeared to have fully functional systems...for now.


While teams kept testing their CPUs, it was generally accepted that no one would catch up to Team Belgium's 5.6Ghz monster.


With the warm-up session winding down, and media packing into the room, it was time for the MC Colin Brix to start with the introductions.


First things first, all the sponsors gave a brief speech...


...and then they smashed the SuperPI/3DMark ice sculpture into a million bits.


Next all the competitors were called on stage, but with time running out and the sub-zero cooled systems sitting unattended, they were all anxious to get back to the business at hand.


Now it's becoming tradition that an overclocking competition needs cold beer on hand, so hicookie took it upon himself to insta-cool a few cans.

With that done, it was time for the SuperPI 32M competition to begin!