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Gigabyte’s CES 2014 Overclocking Event: Enthusiasts In Vegas
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1. Hidden Without

In the midst of CES hustle and bustle, Gigabyte organized an out-of-the-way gathering of overclockers and media. The firm issued a public invitation, but only those who confirmed attendance got a shot at the location. A ten-minute walk from the building’s entrance and staged at night, security through obscurity appeared to be the idea.

2. But No Secrects Within?

Demo systems and exhibit parts from Gigabyte, Enermax, and G.Skill lined three of the walls, while the fourth was set up for hardware sets.

3. OK, Maybe Slightly Secret...

Among the items on diplay were several prototypes, such as the silent Bay Trail-based system that’s scheduled for production near the end of Q1 2014.

4. A Look Forward With SATA Express

We’ve seen many companies try their hand at external PCIe connectivity, but most get killed before they go to production due to licensing and driver issues with Thunderbolt. Gigabyte believes it solves the bandwidth issues experienced by those 10 and 20 Gb/s concepts by using SATA Express, which allows eight full-bandwidth PCIe 2.0 lanes to communicate over two cables.

5. Expanding The Expander

If you think eight PCIe lanes aren't enough, Gigabyte says it can do 16 though four SATA Express cables. In fact, its engineers told us that this “turnkey solution” will probably come first, once manufacturing hurdles are cleared.

6. If You Build It…

Every event needs people, and free goodies usually draw them in. All four sponsors provided door prizes for participating overclockers that ranged from memory kits to cases.

7. …And Stock It Well…

Two tanks of LN2 would give these overclockers enough cooling to push the event well past its five-hour schedule. That is, in addition to all the free hardware.

8. ...They'll Overclock It

The mix was roughly half overclockers, one-quarter media, and one-quarter industry insiders.

9. The Fairer Side Of Overclocking

We all know that female overclockers exist, but few of us have seen one. Gigabyte’s event featured two, but the other one always seemed to have her back turned to the camera.

10. Fueling Up For The Fight?

Gigabyte timed food delivery to almost perfectly coincide with the time between prepping and testing of overclocked platforms. Enthusiasts who like good food and love free beer were wise to respond to Gigabyte’s invitation.

11. The Battle Begins

With their systems and their stomachs now prepared, attendees were ready to pour on the cooling and get clocking. This “non-competitive friendly gathering” was still supposed to be an exhibition, but most teams continued to keep their results private.

12. Modding Too

Gigabyte even invited a custom chassis builder to put his mad mod skills into event-branded open platforms. Farther down the table, more overclockers look on.

13. Finally, A World Record!

Around six hours later, even the die-hard overclockers were ready to call it a night. But Gigabyte still had a tank of liquid nitrogen remaining, waiting for their return.

The excitement began after all of those hours of work. Having witnessed a couple of ~6.5 GHz overclocks and a lowely 5.6 GHz on an unlucky CPU sample, Dino and Steponz set a Unigine Heaven (Xtreme Preset) world record of 8710.91 DX11 Marks using four Radeon R9 290X graphics cards at 1300 MHz GPU, a Core i7-4770K at 6.4 GHz, and two G.Skill DDR3-2666 C10 modules at CAS 9!

14. Yet Another World Record!

While several teams focused primarily on CPU performance, others were busy modifying their graphics cards. I didn’t get to see any results from those systems in our first day of coverage, but Gigabyte returned with a later O/C record from ViVi. The team used Gigabyte’s Z87X-OC motherboard to push a Core i7-4770K to 6.4 GHz, G.Skill Pi series GDDR3-2200 C7 to DDR3-2400 C8, an AX1200i power supply (with apologies to event co-sponsor Enermax), and EVGA’s K|NGP|N GTX 780 Ti at 1550 MHz/1925 MHz GPU/Boost.