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Gigabyte TweaKING OC Event: European Final

Posted 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!

Written on 3rd November 2009
Tags competiton, gigabyte, overclocking, tweaking

Do enthusiasts get ripped off?

Posted at 10:40 by Mark Mackay with 22 comments

As just about every bit-tech reader will know, hardware that falls into the ‘enthusiast’ bracket often carries a fat price tag. People who take hobbies seriously are - more often than not - willing to invest serious amounts of money in them and hardware enthusiasts are no different. But are manufacturers taking it too far with their pricing of enthusiast products?

Written on 7th September 2009
Tags asus, enthusiast, motherboard, overclocking, value for money

Asus Xtreme Global Summit Competition Week 4 Winners

Posted at 17:54 by Alex Watson with 90 comments

And so we reach the end... the end of the beginning, at any rate, as we're ready to announce the final five winners of tickets to our Asus Xtreme Global Summit event along with the prizes that entails.

This week's blog post was all about overclocking, and the question we asked was simple: "what single tweak, invention, feature, BIOS option or idea would make overclocking better for you?

Read on to see who the lucky winners are!

Written on 21st August 2009
Tags asus, competition, motherboards, overclocking, xtreme global summit

WIN: Asus Xtreme Global Summit Competition Week 4

Posted at 16:18 by Alex Watson with 18 comments

So far we’ve announced 15 of the 20 winners in our Asus Xtreme Global Summit competition, over the course of three previous blogs looking at the various design innovations Asus is introducing in its upcoming P55 boards. It’s now time for the fourth and final giveaway of tickets! Read on to find out how you can get your hands on one.

Written on 19th August 2009
Tags asus, competition, motherboards, overclocking, xtreme global summit

First Look: The first P55 RoG board, the Maximus III Formula

Posted at 10:02 by Clive Webster with 17 comments

Morning! I realise that when it comes to P55, most of you just want performance numbers, but sadly I can't quite put you out of your misery. I can however, offer a preview of what's likely to be a very special P55 motherboard - the first to wear the Republic of Gamers badge, namely the Maximus III Formula. Shots and discussion below the break.

Written on 10th August 2009
Tags asus, intel, layout, lga1156, lynnfield, motherboard, overclocking, p55, republic of gamers, rog

What makes a classic overclocking motherboard?

Posted at 08:29 by Mark Mackay with 26 comments

It should be said that on the grand scale of everything, I’m relatively new to the world of performance hardware. Some of the guys on the team have been into PC hardware and modding since the late 1500s and a few even longer than that. I got my first PC when I was 18 (about 8 years ago now) and it took a couple of years before I became interested in modding and overclocking.

This post is all about what makes a classic overclocking motherboard, and I feel I ought to apologise at the outset to the old schoolers for not mentioning any classic Uberboards that date from before my day.

Written on 17th June 2009
Tags asus p5b, chipset, commando, intel 975x, intel p35, intel p965, luck, magic, motherboard, overclocking

Do Overclocking Tournaments Work?

Posted at 14:23 by Richard Swinburne with 34 comments

I'm confused.

I admire the people that take part in overclocking tournaments but I fail to understand why so much money is plowed into them by big hardware companies, presumably keen to use the event as a marketing tool.

Gigabyte has its Gigabyte Open Overclocking Championship (GOOC), MSI has MOA, and Asus and DFI have also had a stab at running their own events, and I'm curious to understand if you, the readers, follow them, takes note of what happens and even cares?

Written on 21st May 2009
Tags asus, dfi, gigabyte, gooc, ln2, moa, msi, overclocking, tournament

Overclocking the ATI Radeon HD 4770

Posted at 15:40 by Tim Smalley with 12 comments

One thing we unfortunately had to cut out of our AMD ATI Radeon HD 4770 review yesterday was overclocking. Understandably, a number of our readers asked why we'd not bothered to overclock the card.

The answer is that we simply ran out of time when we made the decision to double (and triple) check all of our Far Cry 2 performance numbers when the new Radeon came out on top against the cards we'd compared it to. Although the results were theoretically possible - compared to the much-loved Radeon HD 4850, it has a higher pixel fillrate and very similar theoretical shader throughput (it's just four percent lower), we wanted to be not just doubly sure, but triply sure before publishing our conclusions.

Yesterday afternoon, I dragged myself back down into the benchmarking sweatshop that is the bit-tech and Custom PC labs to find out how well our reference card overclocked. It's worth noting that it's not the only Radeon HD 4770 we've got in house - there are a couple of partner cards already and we'll be looking at them in due course - but we've only focused on overclocking the reference card for now.

Written on 29th April 2009
Tags 4770, amd, ati, overclocking, radeon hd 4770, rivatuner, tweaking

Where are all the AMD AM3 motherboard reviews?

Posted at 10:22 by Richard Swinburne with 17 comments

We know a lot of our readers want to see AM3 motherboard reviews and we have been trying to accommodate this request since February - honest! Fanboys have been crying bias and that couldn't be any farther from the truth - here's why.

We have been working on no less than three 'new' AMD motherboards since we completed our Socket AM3 processor review at the start of February, but the problems have been continual, and no manufacturer has been left unmarked by the spattering of not quite there yet.

Normally we'd just go ahead with a review since the products are all ready on sale, but with each one we want to get to the bottom of their wierdness before we post a review. Also, we'd usually keep the inevitable debugging process sort of thing between ourselves and the parties involved but as it stands we don't know when we'll be able to get you a full review so we thought at least we'd keep you updated on our already delayed progress.

Written on 7th April 2009
Tags achi, am3, amd, asus, gigabyte, msi, overclocking, reviews

Where are the decent Socket AM2+ motherboards?

Posted at 12:44 by James Gorbold with 7 comments

Now that AMD has finally managed to release a Phenom-branded processor worth buying, the Phenom II X3 720 Black Edition, albeit a fairly basic triple-core model, another fundamental problem has been revealed – the lack of killer Socket AM2+ motherboards.

Despite the efforts of the combined bit-tech and Custom PC reviews writers (we’ve looked at 20 plus Socket AM2+ motherboards in the last six months) none have really stood out – at least not for the right reasons. Although there have been a few ‘better than average’ designs, such as the Asus M3A79-T Deluxe, most of the motherboards have offered a poor combination of sluggish performance, limited overclocking and restrictive BIOSes.

Written on 22nd February 2009
Tags amd, overclocking, phenom ii, socket am2+, vrms

Archive for the ‘overclocking’ tag

Gigabyte TweaKING OC Event: European Final

Gigabyte TweaKING OC Event

European Final

Do enthusiasts get ripped off?

Asus Xtreme Global Summit Competition Week 4 Winners

WIN: Asus Xtreme Global Summit Competition Week 4

First Look: The first P55 RoG board, the Maximus III Formula

What makes a classic overclocking motherboard?

Do Overclocking Tournaments Work?

Overclocking the ATI Radeon HD 4770

Where are all the AMD AM3 motherboard reviews?

Where are the decent Socket AM2+ motherboards?

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Archive for the ‘overclocking’ tag

Gigabyte TweaKING OC Event

European Final

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Archives

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