jmke

7 stages, 7 weeks, 7 prizes, 150 countries

Wake up everyone!!

HWBot is excited to present its first official competition. The concept is completely different from all other competitions so far, so let us explain.

1. Concept

The competition consists of seven benchmarks spread over seven weeks. In other words, chances are big that you will not have the time to submit a world record breaking result, which makes it interesting to see who will come up with the best result within a very limited time-frame. The results are grouped per country and countries are ranked based on the average score of the top-3 submissions. So, in order to win, you will have to motivate your fellow overclockers to submit good results. Per stage, countries are awarded points and the country that gathered most points at the end of seven stages wins the competition.

2. Stages

For each stage, the HWBot staff has prepared a combination of platform and benchmark. To keep things exciting, we will not reveal the combination, but only the list of platforms and benchmarks. This prevents people from benching in advance and preserves the concept of one-week benching, but still allows people to prepare as you can already figure out the limitations of the platform. The only two people who know the combination of the platform and benchmarks are RichBa5tard and Massman. Evidently, both can not win anything in this competition.

2.a. Benchmarks

• 3DMark01
• 3DMark Vantage
• Pifast
• SuperPI 1M
• SuperPI 32M #1
• SuperPI 32M #2 (different hardware limitations)
• Wprime 32M

2.b. Required hardware

In order to make this competition fun and challenging, each stage will have certain hardware limitations. For example, we could limit the 3DMark01 stage to only use a Intel Core 2 Quad processor. The hardware requirements for each stage will be announced a few days before the start of the stage.

Hardware required if you want to compete in all stages:

• AMD processor
• AMD/ATI videocard
• A P55 motherboard
• Intel Core 2 Quad (not extreme)
• Any single core processor
• Any Intel Core i7 processor

If you do not own this hardware, either go bargain hunting or encourage fellow countrymen with this hardware to join the competition. There are 7 stages in this competition, so it's not a disaster if you can't compete in one of the stages due to hardware limitations. Remember, in the Country Cup competition it's not important how high you score, it's important how high your country top 3 average is.

3. Prizes

As this is an official HWBot competition, we need to give away prizes to those who performed best during this competition. Although this is a country competition we cannot give a prize to every single overclocker from the winning country. No, you have to put a lot of effort in trying to win something.

At the end of the competition, there will be a top-3 formed based on the points each country has been able to gather. The best overclockers from each country will be sent a K|ngp|n LN2 container. The containers (2x CPU, GPU and NB) are awarded as follows:

• Winning Country: top 3 overclockers get each one container
• Runner-up: top 2 overclockers get each one container
• Third: best overclocker gets one container.
• Special achievements (eg first submission): hwbot T-shirts, hwbot dog tags

4. Rules

• Submission verification must be according to the HWBot rules.
• We expect everyone to play fair, whoever cheats in this competition gets banned from HWBot.
• This is not a software tuning competition, but an overclocking competition. Any special software tweaks must be explained to the HWBot staff during the competition and will be published on HWBot afterwards.
• Reminder: act smart.
• Retail hardware only. Hardware must be availabe for purchase at the beginning of this competition. Pre-order is not okay.
• The usage of Liquid Helium is not prohibited.

More details and the official link to the competiton microsite will be published next week. The first stage of the competition will start on Wednesday the 4th of November.

http://hwbot.org/competition/country_cup_2009

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