Posted on 3rd Nov 2009 at 14:55 by Richard Swinburne with 2 comments
Gigabyte TweaKING OC Event
European Final
Manufacturer: Gigabyte
Gigabyte are well known for its overclocking events: the Gigabyte Open Overclocking Championship (GO OC) ran earlier this year and encouraged competitors to overclock their Core i7 CPUs using any means possible, and ran Super Pi 8M and 3DMark 06 for the best scores.
18 Teams competed from all around Europe. Click to enlarge
The TweaKING event in Paris is the European leg of this new style of OC tournament. Less emphasis is placed on the quality of CPU and more is placed on the ability of the teams to tweak the memory and motherboard. How? The CPU frequency is capped at 4GHz, meaning the teams had to crank the memory and baseclock on their Lynnfield i5-750 CPUs up as high as possible to achieve the best result.
Much time was spent in the BIOS tweaking settings. Click to enlarge
This still puts an emphasis on CPU quality to some degree, but its also brings the motherboard back into play more, which is an angle Gigabyte obviously wants to push. There was no limitation on the OS tweaks allowed too; so WinXP hacks a plenty were rolled out: services were neutered, registry was copiously tweaked and anything deemed excess was cut off.
However, every team had a standard set of hardware to use: nothing extra was allowed, not even an additional fan. Even screwdrivers were provided!
