Gigabyte's Open Overclocking Championship
With the first practice session over, Gigabyte UK's Rui Pereira, accompanied by one of the day's many distractions, finally announces that benchmarking using Super PI's 8M option had started. With many teams off to a flying start, the UK team hit an early wall of frustration and were unable to get their Intel Core i7-965 Extreme Edition past 4.25GHz. Meanwhile the Swedes and Belgians were already past the 5GHz barrier and posted times of 1m 30s 328ms and 1m 29s 828ms respectively securing very solid second and first places.
With the vCore way over 1.6v and clock speeds for most teams rising above 4.8GHz, the pots soon started streaming gas as the LN2 boiled off. Now lagging behind many other teams and not having posted a score, the UK team turned their attention to the temperature of their Core i7 CPU. After some intense testing, they discovered it had a cold bug at about -71°C. If it went any colder the system would freeze. In fact they had a bit of a fright when the system suddenly failed to boot at all after one such crash but luckily it magically came back to life and they set about improving their overclock.
Finally the UK team were getting somewhere and in between Philip tweaking the BIOS and Peter running backwards and forwards to get more LN2 and keep their Core i7 as close to -71°C as possible, they recorded their first result with a CPU clock speed of 4.7GHz which put them in sixth position with a time of 1m 38s 844ms ahead of Russia, Greece and Italy who had posted scores. Then in a double hit, their board stopped posting - at the same time the Belgians managed to better their own first place score with a time of 1m 29s 203ms having obtained a sky high clock speed of 5.238GHz.
Unfortunately for the UK team, other teams were now overtaking them including France who posted a time of 1m 33s 953ms, leapfrogging the UK, Poland and the Czech team and sat solidly in 5th place. The final wistle blew and in the end the Belgians held on to their early first place, as did the Swedes with their second place slot with the UK team coming 10th.
With the vCore way over 1.6v and clock speeds for most teams rising above 4.8GHz, the pots soon started streaming gas as the LN2 boiled off. Now lagging behind many other teams and not having posted a score, the UK team turned their attention to the temperature of their Core i7 CPU. After some intense testing, they discovered it had a cold bug at about -71°C. If it went any colder the system would freeze. In fact they had a bit of a fright when the system suddenly failed to boot at all after one such crash but luckily it magically came back to life and they set about improving their overclock.
Finally the UK team were getting somewhere and in between Philip tweaking the BIOS and Peter running backwards and forwards to get more LN2 and keep their Core i7 as close to -71°C as possible, they recorded their first result with a CPU clock speed of 4.7GHz which put them in sixth position with a time of 1m 38s 844ms ahead of Russia, Greece and Italy who had posted scores. Then in a double hit, their board stopped posting - at the same time the Belgians managed to better their own first place score with a time of 1m 29s 203ms having obtained a sky high clock speed of 5.238GHz.
Unfortunately for the UK team, other teams were now overtaking them including France who posted a time of 1m 33s 953ms, leapfrogging the UK, Poland and the Czech team and sat solidly in 5th place. The final wistle blew and in the end the Belgians held on to their early first place, as did the Swedes with their second place slot with the UK team coming 10th.
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