Inside: Jagat Review’s Overclocking Chamber

Monday, July 26 2010, we decided to relocate Jagat Review’s overcloking lab to our new office at Majapahit Road, Harmoni, Central Jakarta. A special room right next to the storage area is reserved for this purpose. Honestly speaking, we were all a bit worried by the idea of placing a team of hard-core overclockers on the same floor as our working space, but at least we get to see live actions from our overclocker, Alva Jonathan a.k.a Lucky_n00b, along with his two comrades, Hendra Wijaya and Hendra Masli, as they conduct wicked experimentations and push our poor computer hardwares to their limit… and beyond.

Two days later, on July 28 2010, Alva came down to the office, dragging along what seems to be an assortment of weird-looking tools and dangerous materials. The rest of the Jagat Review team helped him carry those things to the second floor, where the overclocking room is located. Among other stuffs, we noticed a closet where Alva stores his personal belongings, and a Dewar cylinder used to store his supply of LN2 (liquid nitrogen), specifically intended for extreme overclocking actions. At night that same day, Alva had already started some experiments, killing a few motherboards in the process. Luckily for us, he didn’t end up burning the office down. We all need to be careful with this bunch.

We’re a bit curious about Alva’s tools. So, last Thursday night, we snagged ourselves a camera and creep inside his “forbidden chamber”. Of course, we had obtained his permission beforehand, since Alva’s the only one who holds the key to that particular room.

From outside, the overclocking room seems just like an ordinary office space. Well, it is an ordinary office space… The only thing that makes it look slightly different with the rest of the second floor is the pink carpet. Alva specifically requested for this color prior to the room’s construction. Geniuses tend to be eccentric indeed.

Inside the room, we immediately noticed a whiteboard on which Alva writes his weekly schedule. The pink carpet started making us feel a bit uncomfortable. We decided to take a look at the whiteboard anyway.

We could barely understand the meaning of those numbers and writings on the whiteboard. The only thing that seemed to make sense is the word “DEAD”, written somewhere along the bottom. Only Alva knows exactly what it means. Next, we turned our heads to the direction of the three desks lined on one side of this room.

On the leftmost desk, we spotted Alva’s test bed components: an MSI Big Bang Fuzion motherboard, a WD Velociraptor HDD, an 800-watt CoolerMaster SilentPro Gold PSU, an A-DATA RAM module, and a debug LED indicator that will let the user know if something had gone wrong during system boot-up. Pretty much an average fare for most computer enthusiasts. We moved on to the next desk…