Chris: Hopefully everyone is enjoying a couple of days off with family and friends during this end-of-year holiday season. From everyone here at Tom's Hardware, here's hoping the break is treating you well.

Now that the Overdrive overclocking competition is over and done with, we wanted to give you a more in-depth look at what went down during the weekend when Team USA earned its first-place finish. In case you didn’t know, we held the world finals two weekends ago, from December 13th to 14th, with participants from five countries: France, Germany, Italy, Taiwan, and the United States.

The finals of the competition—whose participants were chosen from among the readers of our sites—was held in our Paris office using a test rig based on Intel's Core i7 and an X58 platform manufactured by MSI.

The Event's Vitals

The contest actually began on Friday, December 12 with a welcoming ceremony for the participants. What followed was comprised of more than 16 hours of benchmarks, 10 monitors, more than 10 TB of hard drive space, enough graphics power to make Pixar jealous (Ed.: OK, maybe not), 13 contestant, and six Tom's Hardware staff to supervise and validate scores. It also featured over 200 GHz in cumulative clock speed between the execution resources involved: five Core i7s, each with eight logical cores, overclocked to more than 5 GHz. Also on hand were 450 liters of liquid nitrogen at -196°C, 10 representatives sent by our sponsors, more than 10 kilowatts of power (if you were to total the output of the PSUs in play), and over 40 liters of beer.

If you'd like to see the blow-by-blow of how the competition transpired as it was happening, check out our event landing page, which hosts all of the news, picture stories, and editorial content.