The legendary Hipro5 makes a few final preperations before official benchmarking begins. Here we can see a member of the Polish team cutting out sections of neoprene to fit the motherboard. At the end of benchmarking, only one of the fourteen teams had to replace their motherboard so these early preperations paid dividends and allowed for a very productive benchmarking session.





Above we can see an interesting addition to the Serbian team's pot. We also spotted an interesting way to reduce the risk posed by condensation. The Swiss team enclosed their hardware in an acrylic cube with small openings allowing the LN2 to be poured in to the three pots through funnels. In theory it should work, although we suspect some of that beer found its way into their pots as they didn't do amazingly well!



Occasionally there would be a loud blast from the corner of the room the hundreds of litres of LN2 was stored. It frightened everyone at least once during the afternoon, but it was necessary to vent gas from the containers. Above we can also see Peter at work soldering on his own voltage monitor for a more trustworthy readout than the standard BIOS report.



As soon as the event started it was a hive of activity from start to finish, even during the lengthy practice sessions. Final preperations included the wrapping of pots in tissue paper to stave off the condensation for a bit longer.