Workshop & Overclocking Competition
Workshop & Overclocking Competition
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As mentioned in the intro, due to overbooking of the main floor, the overclocking competition didn't actually happen on the gaming room floors, and was instead relocated to an actual class room on the 3rd floor. It greatly diminished foot traffic and viewership, but it provide a safe environment in which to leave hardware and play around with liquid nitrogen (LN2).
There were two main parts of this event, the World Series Competition that overclockers paid entry for in exchange for a desk spot and unlimited LN2 use, and a free overclocking workshop that taught people the basics of overclocking and allowed those students to take part in the amateur overclocking competition. Both were happening throughout the day on Saturday.
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There were four system setup for use by the amateurs, two ASUS based and two MSI based, and all featuring a Intel Pentium G3258 processor, Intel Z97-based motherboard, Kingston DDR3-1600 memory kit, and Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO heatsink, and Corsair CX600 PSU. Each individual that completed the overclocking workshop would be allowed 30 minutes of hands-on time with the system of their choosing in order to achieve the best possible score using the benchmark built into the
Intel Extreme Tuning Utility (XTU). Those with the highest scores had the opportunity to compete against each other on Sunday, and the three would walk away with some very nice prizes (like a whole G3258/Z97 system).
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Since the World Series overclocking competition was taking place in a somewhat small room with a bunch of people, some of whom had never actually used LN2 before, the
Overclocking-TV.com guys (Trouffman & Xyala) took it upon themselves to
individually brief every non-amateur overclocker on how to safely use LN2. It was a thoughtful step, that we have never actually seen before at a live overclocking event.
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In the main room there was a 30 liter and 50 liter Dewar, the latter of which had pressure issues and therefore had to be poured out manually. There were four huge tanks holding 1,000 liters in the shipping docks, which was overkill considering the six LN2overclockers present, but at least there was absolutely no chance of running out.
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At this event, there were three Canadians (Rasparthe, Johan45, marc0053) and three Americans (jiccman1965, OCNKoSoVaR, MrBreeze), so it was a proper 'North American' competition.
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Overclocking-TV.com was live broadcasting the whole competition with a bunch Logitech C920 webcams scattered here and there. As you can see directly below, they also setup some truly excellent screen capture technology so that the live viewers could see in real-time what was on the screen of the amateur systems. It really improved the live feed, and brought the act of watching overclocking events into the high-tech future.
This is what the live feed viewers were able to see when the feed was switched to 'spy' on the amateur systems. On the right hand side, is where you would usually have one of the two Overclocking-TV guys or even Massman (of
HWBOT.com) doing a little play-by-play of what was happening in the room.
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Each overclocker was asked what their goal for the day was, but there were also three different challenges that the overclockers had to meet. The competition was designed as a three stage round, each stage featuring its own set of specific limitations. They were somewhat arbitrary, but still quite fun. Like trying to get as close as possible to 3510 on Unigine Heaven Xtreme.
Click here to check out the final leaderboard.
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The LN2 overclockers at work. They each had to bring every piece of hardware that they used, which is pretty damn impressive when you consider that a few flew into Montreal for this event.
Throughout the day, a steady flow of LAN participants came into to take part in the free overclocking workshop that taught people the basics of overclocking, and allowed those students to take part in the amateur overclocking competition. We missed the Amateur final on Sunday, but overall it was great community outreach effort. You could tell that people were truly interested in this subject. Many had heard about overclocking before, and even maybe tried it a little bit, but being able to really tinker with a safe machine that they didn't have to worry about breaking obviously opened up a bunch of new possibilities.
Since this event is likely to happen again next year, we definitely invite everyone to come check it out. We guarantee that you will see and/or learn something new, and you will also get to meet some of the Hardware Canucks staff.