I think the previous is pretty clear and straightforward; it is of vital importance that each participant should be aware of his function or job if you can call it like that. Time to move onto our submissions in the Team Cup 2016, which was a massive 30 individual stages. A total of five sub-competitions covering pretty much all aspects of modern and retro hardware overclocking and include CPU, GPU, Memory and some miscellaneous stages.

Massman's latest creation really blew us away at first glance, though not all stages required 3 submissions to get an average score, so we started to verify which hardware was still needed to get submissions in for each stage. Usually this is the hardest part to check Ebay and other hardware forums to get all the gear you need, especially the good legacy stuff is getting more scarce each year.

SC1: Current Gen

The Current platform category was easy on the hardware side as we had most hardware in the team.

• Stage 1: SuperPi 1M - Skylake/Haswell (Best of 3 CPUs)
• Stage 2: 3DMark11 Full Out - 1x GPU GeForce 600/700
• Stage 3: HWBOT Prime - Mobile Haswell/Skylake (Best of 3 CPUs)
• Stage 4: Geekbench3 Multi Core - Steamroller architecture
• Stage 5: 3DMark Fire Strike Extreme 1x GPU - AMD HD 7000 (Best of 3 GPUs)
• Stage 6: GPUPI for CPU 1B - Haswell-E
• Stage 7: Memory Clock - DDR4

For Stage 1 we had no problem to go for a solid average as most of our Skylake and Haswell CPUs did 6.4-6.5Ghz, especially when an average is calculated it is better to get good enough scores in than one stellar one and two below average ones. It is a must to get scores in as you will be ranked higher with 3 average ones than another team with just two awesome scores.

On Stage 2 Oldscarface could go flat-out with in total four ASUS GTX 780 Ti cards on his cascade friendly Intel i7-5960X processor. For 3Dmark11 multi-GPU it is vital that the PhysX and combined tests remain efficient. Would you believe me it is not always the highest clocks and the latest 3D11 version which are faster here.... it took Roger a few nites to get his drivers right and the platform dialed in to produce that massive 41K score.

Stage 3 was the return of our hardware master Gamer who aided to boost the team total. Also big thanks goes out to Tones allowing us to bench a few of their gaming notebooks. Same for our young paddawan MacCleod who put his Intel NUC to the test.

Stage 4 required only one Geekbench submission. I was clearly held back by my Gigabyte G1 Sniper FM2 motherboard, not only in the memory department but also needed higher voltages to maximize the AMD Kaveri 7870K APU. Bought an ASUS Crossblade Ranger and could squeeze another 250MHz out of the same cpu. The Corsair Samsung memory was smooth sailing at almost 2600MHz, while being maxed out before at a mere 2400MHz. A perfect example of the importance of having the right hardware to play with. The 3.3.2 Geekbench version remains the fastest for me, always scoring like 50 points higher than newer versions.

The Firestrike Extreme round of Stage 5 was a time consuming one too as we were initially struggling with the Core i7-6950X on the MSI Godlike Gaming motherboard. Blood, sweat and tears to get the CPU past 4800MHz. Thanks to DrWeez for some tips on the Godlike's Bios to unleash the true power. Kuddos MSI and Andrew!

This stage was dominated by the importance of the right AMD driver selection and proper Catalyst settings. My 7970 Lightning was not a screamer on water (1260Mhz max) so I had to LN2 it to reach similar clocks as some did on their chilled water setup sigh.

Next stage was GPUPI where Oldscarfe pushed his 5960X on LN2 to new heights as he completed the benchmark at 5900Mhz at only 1.55Vcore lol.

For your info I absolutely don't see the point in raw frequency benchmarks like CPU and memory speed, yet it had to be done for each last stage. Oldscarface managed to reach 2255Mhz with his B-die sticks, which we bested (thanks to Sam) to reach a final 2320Mhz on an air cooled B-die G.Skill stick. Again good enough for top spot not only in the last but nearly in all stages. Well done team!