Gigabyte Open Overclocking Championship 2010 – Summary

There were only a few simple rules to dictate the game with and make sure that nobody’s taking an unfair advantage over the other. Only air-cooling methods were allowed in that first day of the competition. Gigabyte, however, did not specify what the air cooling solution should be like. The contestants are free to use whatever cooling peripheral they please, as long as it uses the air as the primary cooling agent.

Alva Jonathan, the overclocker from Jagat Review, brought along a specially designed Styrofoam box along with a handful of dry ice. He used the box to create an enclosed space for the motherboard, isolating it from the warm tropical air on the outside. Then, by throwing in some nice chunks of dry ice inside the box, he lowered the ambient temperature in it, thus allowing for a better overall condition for his overclocked rig.

Each one of the contestants came equipped with same list of hard wares, provided by the organizer. Here are the complete specs:

Processor: Intel Core i7 980X Extreme Edition
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD7
Memory: Kingston HyperX KHX2000C9AD3T1K3/6GX
Hard disk: Seagate Barracuda XT 6Gbps
Power Supply Unit: Antec TPQ 1200W
Monitor: LG E2550V
Input Devices: Microsoft Wired Desktop 500 keyboard and mouse

As for the cooling, the contestants must bring along their own solutions. Four benchmarking soft wares were used to measure the scores generated from each over clocking attempt: Super PI mod 1.5 (32nm), MAXXMEM, Pifast, and Wprime 32nm. The winner will be decided based on the accumulated score from each benchmark. A team of judges would also stroll around and check on each contestant’s progress every 30 minutes. Contestants submitted their score to the board of organizers (via USB thumb drive) every 30 minutes also, so there was always a constant change of ranks on the leader boards.

Three hours later, all contestants were summoned to the stage. It was time to select three of them with the highest accumulative score to be pitted against overclockers from all over Asia and Africa on June 19. Ekky and Patar managed to secure the first and second Runner up positions, respectively. Meanwhile, Alva Jonathan, the overclocker from Jagat Review, got through to the first place. The Styrofoam box trick worked flawlessly and he scored enough points to win the first prize: Rp 2,5 million in cash along with a Gigabyte X58A-UD7 motherboard. Quite a bounty by most standards. Though the result was actually somewhat unsurprising for us, it’s still nice to know that one of our own guy successfully made it into the Asian-African finals.