Related articles

• Team USA Emerges In Round One of Overdrive

  It’s been incredibly busy around our Culver City office for the past month or so, while preparing for our first-ever Overdrive overclocking competition. For more information on the contest itself, please check out Overclocking Goes Int’l.: Overdrive In The USA. If you’d like to see some of the pictures we were posting semi-live as the event transpired, you can check those albums out here (Tom’s OC Competition: Mid-day Pics ) and here (Tom’s OC Competition: LN2 Craziness ). We also posted a video of some of the event’s highlights. Check out VIDEO: Tom’s Overclocking Competition. But the purpose of this piece is to give you a play-by-play of how things went down, to introduce you to our winners and, in the conclusion, present you with a video interview of the guys who’ll represent the United States in our international finals next month. We’re used to seeing world records being broken by fiercely competitive teams from Greece, Taiwan, and other countries hosting serious overclocking talent. Show your support for Team USA, though—they’re going to be working with high-end Core i7 equipment. The potential to set brand new world records will be there, and we hope to take home the competition’s grand prize. The list of contestants who flew and drove in to compete looked a little something like this: John J. Crimmins III Team Ironmods Los Angeles Jeremiah L. Allen Team Ironmods Japan Vachira “Ton” Khowdee Team Ironmods Los Angeles John Clint Pate Team 5G Waco Jason Sones Team 5G Waco John Nicholson Team 5G Waco Russ Starr OCForums New York Matthew Kinley OCForums South Korea Jeremy Clifton OCForums Orlando Donald W. Thompson 411 Overkill Extreme Overclocking Team Trenton Jack A Ferrara 411 Overkill Extreme Overclocking Team New York David Garcia 411 Overkill Extreme Overclocking Team Des Moines All 12 of our overclockers proved to be not only seasoned veterans of hardware tweaking, but also true gentlemen and outright good sports. We saw plenty of help and advice flowing between the four teams, even as the group kept its collective eye on our score board, which was kept updated in real-time. A sincere thank you to all 12 for sharing the weekend with us. Day 1: An Early Start, Unexpected Heat, And Government Intervention We started our first day off bright and early, setting up the outdoor venue at 6:45 AM. At 8:00 AM, the hardware was handed out and each team set to work prepping the gear. If you’ve never overclocked competitively, you’d be amazed at the work that goes into readying a complete platform for two days worth of abuse. Each team approached the process differently, which was surprising, given that they were all ultimately aiming for the same bull’s eye. The gentlemen from Team 5G, for instance, meticulously put together their platform, first coating the MSI P45-based motherboard with liquid electric tape to protect every surface against the damaging effects of water condensation. The group disassembled its GeForce GTX 280 and covered it completely in insulation while mounting a custom copper pot for LN2. The preparation process proved to be quite in-depth—so much so that by the end of the first day, Team 5G only had one score on our board. Nevertheless, the prep work proved invaluable, as even the worst condensation didn’t faze the board, processor, or graphics card. As a result of the upfront effort, 5G didn’t run into problems for the duration of the contest.

• System Builder Marathon, Sept. '09: $650 Gaming PC

  System Builder Marathon, September 2009: The Articles Here are links to each of the four articles in this month’s System Builder Marathon (we’ll update them as each story is published). And remember, these systems are all being given away at the end of the marathon. Keep an eye on this space; this is where we'll post the link to enter the contest for all three systems once the series concludes! Day 1: The $650 Gaming PCDay 2: The $1,250 Enthusiast PCDay 3: The $2,500 Performance PCDay 4: Performance and Value Dissected Introduction As you may recall, the previous System Builder Marathon (SBM) from May 2009 entailed assembling PCs around a portable theme. The $600 Gaming PC was built within a $90 cube-style case, leaving roughly $500 for the remaining system components. Sporting an Intel Pentium E5200 and BFG GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 graphics card, this system was impressive once overclocked, but the processor’s stock performance still left much to be desired. Having the size limitations now lifted, the goal for this September 2009 system was to kick things up a notch and build the best budget gaming machine our SBM series has seen to date. We overclock our SBM PCs to squeeze more performance from each budget, but also realize not all of our readers put the same value into overclocked performance. Our two higher-budget systems still usually deliver solid performance before overclocking, but typically the cheapest system has been built from the ground up for its overclocking potential. This time, we not only aim to increase the gaming performance from our overclocked system, but also want a far more capable stock-clocked machine. To accomplish our goal, we’ll increase our CPU budget and turn towards AMD’s Phenom II line of processors. We also desired more graphics muscle, so in another first for our budget PC, we managed to squeeze a pair of AMD Radeon HD 4850 graphics cards into the mix. Rounding out this Dragon platform is an AMD 790X/SB750 motherboard with CrossFire support.  Once again we needed to make some sacrifices while increasing our typical $625 budget just a bit, but the end result should be well worth the effort. Before we highlight each choice, let’s take a look at the complete component list for this month’s $650 Gaming PC. $650 Gaming PC System Components ComponentModelPrice (USD)CPUAMD Phenom II X2 550 Black Edition $103CPU CoolerAMD Boxed Heatsink/Fan0MotherboardGigabyte GA-MA790X-UD4P $110 RAMOCZ 4GB (2 x 2GB) DDR2 1066 (PC2 8500) Model OCZ2G10664GK$50Graphics2 x Sapphire 100245HDMI Radeon HD 4850 512MB $190Hard DriveWestern Digital Caviar Blue WD5000AAKS 500GB $57SoundIntegrated0NetworkIntegrated0CaseRosewill Wind Ryder RZLS142A-P BK $30PowerAntec EarthWatts EA650 650W$80Optical DriveSamsung Black 22X DVD Burner SATA Model SH-S223B$27Total Price$647

• The first day had its share of trials and tribulations. Part of the fun of an overclocking competition is watching an American drink liquid nitrogen (temperature -196° C, remember). Even if you’re fitted with an American stomach, please don’t try this at home (Ed.: Pierre, I'm hoping the LN2 was never actually swallowed). Running Into Trouble All of the teams ran into problems, but the French took the prize in that department. As mentioned earlier, Marmott missed his plane and had to spend the night in the station in London before catching the first train to Paris. As a result, he didn’t arrive until 11 AM, and Florian had to hold down the fort until then on his own. On top of that, the French overclocking expert is also a tad absent-minded: while chatting with a sponsor (Kingston), he didn’t realize that he was installing a 64-bit version of Windows Vista when he was supposed to be using the 32-bit version, so he had to install his operating system over again. Among other problems that cropped up, our Taiwanese friends thought they had a defective DIMM, then finally realized (at the end of the contest) that the RAM was working fine, and the memory controller built into the processor seemed to be the source of the problem. Their setup would operate only in dual-channel mode (using two DIMMs instead of three). Water Cooling, Air Cooling Before chilling the processor with liquid nitrogen, the majority of the teams did preliminary tests on the components with standard air cooling—this is a way of checking to see that the processor, motherboard, and graphics card are not defective. It was a good thing that they did this, too. The Americans, for example, realized that the heatsink on their northbridge was improperly installed. The Taiwanese decided to go for qualifying scores quickly, and decided to water-cool the graphics card the first day. They also chilled the water with liquid nitrogen, using salt (a request that surprised us a little) to keep the water liquid at sub-freezing temperatures (avoiding the formation of ice in the circuit). Varnish In addition to the stability tests, another important task is taken care of the first day: preparing the equipment. Liquid-nitrogen cooling has inherent risks and obviously the hardware needs to be insulated—computer components don’t really deal with condensation well. Each team had their little tricks in this department, such as erasers for the Germans, unpleasant-smelling varnish for the French, Vaseline for the Americans, and so forth. End-Of-Day results At the end of the day, the Taiwanese managed to run the majority of the 3D tests, whereas the other teams had run only the CPU tests. Among the little problems that befell contestants: one of the German team's results had to be canceled because they’d used the supplied graphics card for installing Vista instead of the GeForce GTX 280 to be used in the tests. The first card was only there so that the OS could be installed without using the main graphics card, enabling it to be prepared for the benches. BenchmarksUSATaiwanGermanyFranceItalySuperPi 1.5 1M (s)8.2668.1578.1257.9877.985SuperPi 1.5 32M (min:s)8 min 03.016s7 min 52.516s7 min 40.953s7 min 24.990s7 min 40.984sWPrime 1.55 32 M (s)5.1885.4225.2195.7565.297WPrime 1.55 1024 M(s)170.375165.872186.982165.11PiFast 4.1(s)17.9817.8617.4417.2917.36AquaMark 2003 (Points)2498082276282389292330433DMark 01 (Points)7055270669710043DMark 03 (Points)6733562953DMark 05 (Points)3370434991331713DMark 06 (Points)2548322394Score Total (Points)320490210350630