Day2: Big winners

In the end, it were the Greek who won the competition, not surprisingly as they’ve been in the top ranking at HWBot too . Hipro5 and GPRHellas have proved to find ways around hardware issues. In all benchmarks they dominated, so first place is more than deserved.

Turkey came in second, France third. Together with SF3D, the Finland team was able to reach 5th place, which is pretty good, if you compare our 3DMark05 against those of the rest of the top10. The Belgian team came in 7th, which is still better than average; congratulation Jip and Pt1t!





Evaluation:

Qualification rounds
In Belgium, the qualification rounds were organized quite well (by us of course ;-) ), resulting in a fierce battle between Blind_ripper and Jip/Pt1t. I have no idea about the other countries, but some were complaining about the weird competition rules and problems receiving the hardware after the qualification rounds.

Transport
Excellent! It was no problem to arrive at Amsterdam and the MSI crew did more than its best to drive everyone from the airport to the restaurant and hotel. Using public transport to move from the hotel to the event and back might not have been the easiest way, but it certainly made us see more of Amsterdam.

Event organization
Perfect! I cannot find another word to describe how I felt when I entered the building for the first time. Ln², dry ice, music on the background, enough room on the tables ... it was perfectly organized. Furthermore, we all knew what was going on at all time, so no one was surprised. The evenings were planned very well and both the Boom Chicago and the guides who showed us around the center of Amsterdam made it all a pleasant stay.

Hardware
I have mixed feelings about this, to be honest. On the one hand, we all hoped to be able to not only push our system to the first spot in this overclocking event, but also to reach to notch scores in the international benchmark rankings, for instance those hosted by HWBot. The hardware was not capable of giving us the last part of the hopes, as most of the scores would not even be in the top10 of their hardware ranking. On the other hand, this is an overclocking challenge, not some sort of overclocking demo. It was meant to be difficult and take a lot of energy out of the contestants. In that aspect, I have no comments as both the motherboard and the CPU were hard enough to push to the limit using liquid nitrogen.

The MSI crew
The people who worked on this event, both preparations and on the event itself, all did more than we could expect from them. Everyone was willing to help out, even if we made the weirdest requests such as toilet paper to serve as insulation. The MSI crew (and the Tweakers.net crew) helped out with filling the LN² dewars and made the event easy for the overclockers. Big, big congratulations towards them.

The overclockers and editors
Although sometimes people disagree in discussions in public forums, no one caused any problems. Most benchers helped out each other if they ran into problems and even though this was a contest, sharing settings was no problem at all! The sharing part of the overclocking community is still alive and a big part of the overclocking process.

Extra pictures and information about the event

MSI’s Overclock Site

XS’s Picture Thread

HD Movie Report - A Must See!



Conclusion:

In the end, I can only come to one possible conclusion: it was a big success. Although the results were not that super in comparison to the results you get at home, benching alone, the challenging hardware, the enthusiasm of both overclockers and the hardworking crew and the beautiful location of Amsterdam made it one great experience.

And, let's not forget that this was a live competition, so it's harder to produce decent numbers if you have a limited time-frame. What I would really like to see, may be biased by my position at HWBot, is a big international overclocking championship in which all the different companies take part. I'm thinking of a large overclocking event with different booths and different overclocking competitions, hopefully hosted by HWBot.org which already has some ideas on paper. The MSI team has shown the path to the correct way of dealing with this kind of big events and I sincerely hope that there will be a 2009 edition as well.

To end with, I'd like to mention the partners of this overclocking event. A big congratulations to them as well, for making this one of the best overclocking experiences I have had.

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