Advanced Overclocking Championship

Category : Extreme

Published by Marc Büchel on 22.08.08

This monday ocaholic had the possibility to travel to Berlin to take pat at the Advanced Overclockin Championship which were organized by ASUS. Team ocaholic was represented by splmann (Roger Tanner) and rewarder (Marc Büchel)

At this point we thank ASUS very much for inviting ocaholic to Berlin. We really enjoyed the time we had there and are all looking forward to a next event.


Introduction

On monday the 18.08.08 ASUS arranged the first AOCC in europe. Therfore they invited ten teams from different countries to Berlin to prove their extreme-overclocking abilities. Switzlerand was represented by splmann (Roger Tanner) and rewarder (Marc Büchel).


Preparations

After an exhausting but very funny night where we had one or two beers too much with overclockers from hungry and holland we arrived in the event location at around 10:30 am. We only had a very vague image with what we would be surprised and therefore we didn't have any expectations. Inside we were nearly buried by hardware. ASUS provided to all the participants Rampage Extreme motherboards and Radeon 4870 X2 graphic cards. At this point all the overclockers were briefed by ASUS and told that we had around one and a half hours to build up the systems and that the benchmark sessions should take part from 14:00 to 18:00. After that they let us hardware hungry child grab the stuff and play with it.

- CPU: Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9770 (C1)
- Mainboard: ASUS Rampage Extreme
- Graphics cards: 2 x ASUS 4870 X2
- Memory: Mushkin DDR3 1800MHz (14400)
- Power supply: Tagan BZ 1300W



with the hardware under our arms we looked for a nice little place and found one near a huge beat box which in the the end maltreated our audiophile mind.





Thanks to our forum member Besi we were the owners of the most impressive pot of all teams.




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The teams

ASUS invited the following ten teams from whole europe:



Switzerland
splman: Roger Tanner
rewarder: Marc Büchel

Germany
Marc-Oliver Lange: Joe_Cool
Michael Schnetzer: No_name

Sweden
Robert Kihlberg: crotale
Marcus Hultin: Kinc

Spain
Sergio San Joaquin: Predator
Xavier Paradera Ferrando: Xevipio

Poland
Marcin Rywak: Ryba
Jakub Natorski: PmP

Hungary
Jó Gábor: Jugeen
Lörince Balàzs: Achill3uS

Belgium
Piotr Fierens: Piotre
Thomas Kerrinckx: Pt1t

Great Britain
Paul Watkinson: Sacha
David Robinson: 4QMAN

Holland
Bart Peters: LOC.O
Roger Kortenhoeven: Oldscarface

Czech Republic
Peter Vavro: Gudas
Lukas Fiala


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The championship

The clock ticked untiringly and so the time flew by. Shortly before two o'clock in the afternoon we were able to test bench our system at 4.8 GHz and -80°C for the first time. Like this we had a first reference point.



Now we had to look for the coldbug and coldboot. We found both pretty soon at -120°C respectively -100°C. Afterwards we did the next benchmark at 5.2 GHz.



Now we were looking for the cpus limits which we finally found after some testing at 5.305 GHz. This step behind us we optimized the RAM timings. Our Mushkins did 7-7-7-21 but after the benchmark with this timings the memory didn't work properly anymore. Even when we tried to boot the system at only -60° and with standard cpu seetings and standard memory timings we weren't able to run windows even nearly stable.

As we turned to the graphic cards shortly we recognized pretty soon that they didn't limit the system. As we highered the clock the system didn't scale. So the result was really down to the CPU.

The final score in 3DMark06 we reached was 30819 Point at 5.305 GHz. In the end this meant the fourth place behind the spanish, polish and swedish guys. They all had CPUs which were able to clock 5.4 GHz to 5.55 GHz.

http://www.ocaholic.ch/modules/xcgal/ ... /AOCC/normal_CIMG0891.JPG




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A wonderful event



Without any doubt we can claim that all the teams appreciated and ejoyed the participation. It was a huge pleasure together with all the other overclockers from whole europe. Eventually one of our readers was one of the early LAN gamers back in the late nineties when online gamers arranged LAN parties to get to know each other more personally. There was just a bunch of like-minded people who instantly got by with eachother. This was the feeling in Berlin: Very special and very nice. Therefore it also didn't matter that there were only two girls from ASUS 8-)

At this point we congratulate the winning teams from Sweden, Poland and Spain. They really did some great overclocking!

Again our special thanks go to ASUS and especially their people who made this event possible. It would really enjoy when it wasn't the last AOCC!


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Author: m.buechel@ocaholic.ch