Event Report: GIGABYTE Open Overclocking Championship 2009

Battle for the Best X58 OC: 3DMark Vantage

With the SuperPI 32M competition over, the competitors had 1 hour to prep for the 3DMark Vantage round.


As mentioned in the guidelines section, although the rules originally stated the 3DMark Vantage would be run with PhysX acceleration enabled, the competitors had a vote and decided to run the benchmark with it disabled. With PhysX enabled, the CPU is effectively taken out of the equation and the overall score difference between a 3.2Ghz and 4.2Ghz Core i7 processor can be as small as 100 points. Therefore, those with more powerful processors would have now have a slightly greater advantage.


Having started to disassemble their system near the end of the SuperPI round, Team USA 1 was still in the process of drying their board and prepping their graphics cards for the round ahead. They appeared confident enough in their hardware and strategy that they did not need the whole hour to prep for 3DMark Vantage.


Team USA 2 had started to prep for the 3DMark Vantage round during the SuperPI round, and they had their system up & running quickly.


Team China was powered up and ready to go as well, and they appeared to have a very strong overall setup.


The Australian Team seemed to have fixed all issues, and were also looking to be top contenders for the 3DMark Vantage round, especially given Deanzo's expertise at overclocking GTX 260's.


Here sno.lcn of Team USA 2 is preparing the third graphics card, which was a wise choice since they were pushing their cards hard enough to create massive artifacts.


Nearing the end of the preparation time all the teams had functional systems, and they all seemed dialed in and ready to perform.


With the 3DMark Vantage prep time over, it was onto the actual competition.