So after all, we made it and after a few kind welcoming words of Gigabyte's spokesmen and woman Sibren and Bernice, the competition got started. When entering the overclocking arena, each team was asked to pick a spot. Every single piece of hardware that was to be used in the contest was already placed on the table:

• Gigabyte EX58-UD4P
  
• Intel I940 Nehalem CPU
  
• 3Gb Kingston HyperX PC14400 rams
  
• Gigabyte GTX 260 Videocard
  
• Enermax Revolution 85+ 1050Watt PSU
  
• 1 HDD with everything pre-installed (XP, benchmarks and utilities)

It has to be mentioned that Gigabyte didn't allow any other software to be used then those pre-installed on the hard disk drive. In other words, the infamous memory tweak Copy-Waza had to be done by hand, instead of using the OCX SuperPi Tweaking utility. In terms of cooling, all but one team opted for liquid nitrogen, of which there was plenty available. Only the team of BT Clocking team was determined to go LN2-less and brought their cascade to play with.

Here's the LN2 tank with Trouffman making some sort of French advances at it (still think he went home alone):



All teams had about 2 hours to pretest the hardware in terms of overclocking capabilities before the first part of the competition started. Our Belgian team instantly chooses for LN2 cooling, partially because we Belgians are just that crazy, partially because they both forgot to bring an air cooler. The CPU LN2 container used by the Belgian team was the Dragon F1 EE from k|ngp|n ( recently reviewed here! ).

For the initial testing they only ran around 20°C base temperature on the container, this to get to know the hardware on air cooling temperatures and thus not having to worry about insulation or condensation issues. Pt1t could not hold himself back and did some changes to his windows desktop. He changed the background to something more suitable for the Belgian team !