Gigabyte Open Overclocking Championship 2009 UK Round

Posted at: Tuesday 3rd March 2009 by Antony Leather

Custom PC attends the UK leg of the Gigabyte Open Overclocking Championship at Milton Keynes' Xscape

Gigabyte held the UK leg of their open overclocking championship at the Milton Keynes Xscape building on Friday and we were there to see the action. Teams from the BenchTec overclocking community competed against those backed by retailers such as YoyoTech, DarkCat Systems, Midland Computers, as well as Ben Bradnick from the Gigabyte UK forums.

Backed by brilliant views of the huge indoor snow slope, the championship was slightly different from previous overclocking events we've attended – usually every team uses liquid nitrogen but due to a lack of UK teams with experience in sub-zero cooling, only Benchtec opted for it, while Yoyotech used water-cooling and the other teams air cooling with Akasa Nero CPU HSFs.

All the teams were using a standardised kit: Enermax Revolution 85+ 850W PSUs, triple channel kits of Kingston HyperX DDR3 RAM and Gigabyte’s own GeForce GTX 260 OC graphics cards. At the heart of the competition was their GA-EX58-UD4P LGA1366 motherboard which was combined with a Core-i7 940 for each team to tweak to the max. Spares of all these components were on tap in the event of kit dying - which is usually a frequent occurrence at events like these.

The first round involved tweaking the CPUs to the max, running Super PI and recording a screenshot of the result and CPU-Z for verification. The event got off to a slow start, and it took at least 15 minutes for anyone to post a score. Clock speeds also stayed in fairly low figures with all but one team struggling to get much above 4GHz. Philip Brown from Midland Computers appeared to have nabbed a stonking Core-i7 940 however, and combined with his overclocking skills, he succeeded in posting scores with the CPU at 4.2GHz, then 4.3GHz and finally 4.5GHz.

With standard air cooling, this is an amazing result and clearly shows that the GA-EX58-UD4P is a capable overclocker too. The final result of 1.44.594 using the 8M Super PI benchmark was enough to secure first place with Yoyotech coming in second with a score of 1.48.094 and Benchtec in third place with 1.50.125.

After a short lunch break, it was back to benchmarking with 3DMark06. The teams were allowed to tweak their GeForce GTX 260 OC graphics cards in addition to their CPU. As most teams had already found the stable limits of their CPUs, the contestants focussed on boosting the core and memory speeds of the cards using Riva Tuner.

The BenchTec team took a while to post their first score but having ironed out their problems in the first round they quickly scrambled up the leader board. They posted an overall 3DMark 06 score of 23,082, and 9,621 in the HDR/SM 3.0 tests in dramatic fashion, thanks to the steam pouring out of their copper pot, which cooled their Core-i7 940 cooled to well below freezing. Midland Computers' stonking CPU overclock helped them a score of 22,157 and 9,366 in the additional test which secured second place and Peter Wright from DarkCat Systems came in at third place with a score of 21,712, just ahead of YoyoTech.