The first 90 mins of Aquamark were like a drag race, with each team pumping out scores each few minutes, thus giving the judges a hard time to verify and upload the scores. Heck we managed it Roman, next year we go for 10 teams :p

The limits of the Gigabyte 7790 Graphics card were quickly found as the GPU clock limits were at 1200Mhz and for the RAMs at 1600MHz due to software limitations. The little extra boost in the Aquamark score was mainly in the CPU clocks and the RAM tweaking.

Most teams got their first set of scores in, only one team was struggling hard. Yes it were the VIPs that had loads of stability and locked CPU multiplier issues with the Z87X-OC board. Most teams reached speeds over 5800MHz. However it seemed Team Freeocen had a pretty good CPU, managing to run AM3 in the end at 6000MHz. Team Ocaholic kept on fighting with the board and persisted to ignore the many proposals to swap the board. Half way through the second stage, they dismounted the DIMMs and found water in the slots... Team Freeocen won the AM3 stage with a nice score of 369K. However later on in stage 3, Team Ocaholic ran a quick AM3 benchmark and did a 370K run for laughs with lower CPU clocks and no OC on the GPU... go figure...

Here's the winning score from Team Freeocen for the Aquamark stage:

It was directly clear that the entire competition would be pretty close as most teams got pretty competitive scores in...

Intel's XTU benchmark was up next. Scaling a lot with heavily tweaked RAMs. Some teams had close to no experience with the provided MFR dimms and went the wrong way, boosting MHz over 3000MHz, but slacking in the secondary and tertiary RAM timings. However that's were most of the battle is fought lads. AWARDFABRIK made their own cheapo ghetto style RAM pot and boy did it pay off.

While the battle was fierce around the 1200ish mark, AWARDFABRIK dropped the bomb half way in the XTU stage with a whopping 1317 score. Most teams were thinking of a bugged run, so the judges asked for a rerun, resulting in the final 1321 XTU score. Stummerwinter and his team mates tweaked the hell out of the secondary timings and seemed to be aware of a glitch in this benchmark. Looking closely on the screenshot most of you will figure most tweaks out :)

Final XTU stage ranking was the following: