SC2: Modern Gen (DDR3)

The modern Gen category (DDR3) we had to complete the following stages:

• Stage 1: XTU - Ivy Bridge/Sandy Bridge (Best of 3 CPUs)
• Stage 2: Vantage 2x GPU - GeForce 500/400
• Stage 3: GPUPI for CPU 100M - Mobile Sandy / Ivy Bridge (Best of 3 CPUs)
• Stage 4: 3DMark11 Physics - Piledriver / Bulldozer
• Stage 5: Unigine Extreme - Radeon HD 6000/5000 (Best of 3 CPUs)
• Stage 6: HWBOT x265 1080P - Sandy Bridge-E
• Stage 7: Memory Clock - DDR3

The XTU stage was one of the focus points as we had pretty good Sandy Bridge CPUs in the team. My 2500K and Gamers 2600K are well above average and even the untested 3770K from Oldscarface was not bad at all. All initial runs were done on Windows 8 32bit on my Maximus V Extreme board. However we got some stiff competition by Team Hardware Reaktor, so we were obliged to re-bench. Using the Samsung based Corsair Dominator 2660C10 Platinums improved the efficiency big time. Buying at last minute a cheap 3570K was also a good investment as it upped our average score with nearly 30points.

Stage 2 needed a 3DMark Vantage submission with two MSI GTX 580 Lightnings in SLI. CPU power was needed and the Intel 4930K at 5800MHz was the winning ingredient. The chiller I've borrowed from Oldscarface had a hard time to keep both of the 580's under control. Maximum two runs in a row were possible. Afterwards it required again some time to cool them down again.

Stage 3 we opted to put each of our mobile CPUs into the MSI GT60 laptop, which is FSB overclockable. Only thing I can add it was not an easy task to open a particular Lenovo notebook lol.

Stage 4 was AMD time again, another fun full pot moment with my FX-8150. My initial score of 11509 was done on Windows 8 and I got tapped on the fingers by Oldscarface. Well he was right as Windows 7 was way more efficient as I got an extra 300 points by just swapping OSses, yet nowhere near the massive 12K score of Johan45. For the final runs more CPU (1.95Vcore) and NB volts unleashed the beast and managed to reach almost 6800MHz, resulting in the fastest PhysX score for AMD CPUs on the BOT.

Unigine Heaven Extreme time in Stage 5, again focus on AMD GPUs. CPU power was not as important here, so we could cool down our Haswell CPUs with a simple AIO water cooling and focus on maximizing the GPUs. Extreme cooling is again the only option, however since two of our cards were based on the AMD 69XX series we knew it would be artifact galore when going subzero. Focus with these cards on the FPS, don't be afraid of heavy artifacts. As long as the FPS are good keep on pushing it. Me and Oldscarface tested a lot of drivers and Catalyst 11.7 seemed to be the best performing one.

The HWBOT X265 for stage 6 was new for most of us, so during the first Team day we just focused on raw performance and got a score of 24.72 with Roger's 3960X at 5.5Ghz. More tuning and exchanging data between me and Roger made it clear our top score would be beaten easily. Enabling the overkill mode and putting it at 2X was a must. So after re-benching it gave Oldscarface almost an extra 2 FPS, enough for a clear win.

Stage 7 again raw memory frequency benching. Pulling out the Gigabyte Z97 OC LN2 board. We topped with the Corsair Vengeance Pro stick on air at 2120Mhz, but apparently we used CPU-Z 1.75 lol. Another re-bench was needed resulting in only 2080MHz. Anyway big thanks to Bernice from GigabyteNL for providing us with one of these rare LN2 boards.