Event Report: GIGABYTE Open Overclocking Championship 2009

Battle for the Best X58 OC: 3DMark Vantage Continued

In the 3DMark Vantage round, the teams that had performed subpar in SuperPI had a chance to win it all since up to 16 points were up for grabs to the team who posted both the highest graphics and overall scores. As you all know, 3DMark Vantage is a heavily GPU-dependent benchmark so although CPU power would come into play, it was tweaks and GPU clocks that would likely pave the road to victory.


The 3DMark Vantage round has begun, this is make it or break it time, and yet Team USA 1 looked very laid back.


Impressively, Team Australia were the first on the board and with a very respectable score as well.


After running some quick 3DMark06 tests for stability, Elmor takes the helm for the 3DMark benching session. Team Sweden is third on the board, but with a fairly weak result.


Team USA 2 were still pushing their cards to the brink, as evidenced by both memory and GPU artifacts on the screen.


Team USA 1 were fourth on the board, but with a weak result. Were they perhaps just toying with the other competitors?


Surprisingly, Team USA 2's motherboard bites the dust before the graphics cards do. Not only has a small puddle of water formed around the chipset cooler, but they have also managed to break off a part of the third PCI-E x16 slot. Time for motherboard #5 for miahallen and sno.lcn.


Out of nowhere, Team USA 1 achieved a massive result, surpassing the other competitors by over 1000 points.


Team Belgium posted their first score, and although it was the weakest so far, it's clear that they were just trying to get a result on the board.


With a little additional GPU voltage at the hands of Elmor, Team Sweden bolstered their score by almost 1100 points.


Less than 10 minutes later, Team Sweden increased their score by another 700 points and overtook Team China.


Not one's to sit on their hands, Team China quickly reclaimed their position #3 with a score of 27972.


Sno.lcn is seen here getting ready to blow dry one of the graphics card's prior to installing it in the team's latest motherboard.


With a flaky system, the Aussie/Kiwi combo could do nothing but smile as they were passed by the surging Team China.


Miahallen and Sno.lcn worked as a team to get their system back up and running as fast as possible in the hopes of getting a score on the board in the dying minutes of the competition. Regrettably, there just was not enough time left.


Having executed their plan perfectly, and with the help of a clever 'old school tweak', Team USA 1 crushed the competition in both graphics and overall scores.

The final results for the 3DMark Vantage 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:

Click on images to enlarge



With the end of the 3DMark Vantage round, the competition is over, so let's find out who walked away the winner.