Event Report: GIGABYTE Open Overclocking Championship 2009

Battle for the Best X58 OC: SuperPI 32M

The first event of the day was SuperPI 32M, which is one of the most popular and competitive benchmarks in the enthusiast realm...right after SuperPI 1M. Latency, memory, and Uncore speeds are important in SuperPI, but processing power is the most crucial factor, so whoever could clock their Intel Core i7 975 XE the highest had a good chance of winning. Given the length of time is takes to run the benchmark, stability is very important as well and software tweaks can play a very significant role in maximizing overall efficiency, which is why SPi 32M is a fairly difficult benchmark to master.


The competition has begun, 100 minutes of SuperPI action.


Team USA 1 was first on the board, setting the bar at a respectable 6 minutes 56 seconds. Being first on the board is a psychological victory more than anything else and is often run with less than optimal settings, so there was no doubt the result would be beaten quickly.


By the 20 minute mark, 5 out of 6 teams had results on the board. Team USA 2 had not posted a result yet because they were having motherboard issues and decided to swap for another sample.


After their first successful SuperPI run, Team Australia killed both their motherboard and their best CPU, so they had to tear apart the whole system once again.


Team USA 1 were throwing results on the board fast and hard, but given their 200Mhz processing deficit to Team Belgium, catching up would be a near miracle.


Team Sweden flew under the radar for a bit, but they posted an impressive and very efficient result.


Despite leading the way for most of the competition, Team Belgium did not rest on their laurels, and with their mighty processor they posted a truly awesome 6 minute 40 second result.


Team USA 2 managed to get their system up and running well enough to be able to throw a quick result up on the board, which was actually an impressive achievement given their hardware problems.


Although Team Australia had their new system up quickly, given their unfamiliarity with the new CPU and the 'green' motherboard they were not able to surpass their initial result.


Having posted a result, if only for symbolic reasons, Team USA 2 started preparing their system for the 3DMark Vantage competition.


Satisfied with their SuperPI result, Fugger and Vapor also begin immediately prepping for 3DMark Vantage, which they were evidently very well prepared for.


The final results for the SuperPI 32M competition were:



Submitted Scores:

Here are the submitted screenshots of the top scores for each team, which should provide a clearer picture of the system clocks and timings each team was running to achieve their best results:



Next up is 3DMark Vantage!