At 7:00 AM Sunday morning, all the teams were ready to get going again. Extreme Hardware and Memory Extreme struggled with their new motherboards, while Hiwa-Zilla-Qballe and NextHardware made some system adjustments before powering up and starting their testing anew.

The liquid nitrogen cooling systems had to be rebuilt from scratch because bringing the temperature to more than 100 degrees below zero causes ice and condensation to form. Leaving those systems installed throughout the night, without taking the right precautions, would have meant finding the hardware in a puddle of water the next morning with devastating consequences. Therefore, at the end of the previous benchmarking session, everything was dismantled and dried so it was ready for reassembly the next day.

About an hour and a half after the teams’ arrival, an almost-surreal silence pervaded the room, with those working on the systems absorbed in their thoughts and those gazing concertedly at the monitor thinking about whether it would have been wise to raise a voltage, change a timing, or increase a frequency. The conversations are almost in whispers. There is a need to do something to change this rhythm and so, we decide it’s time for a coffee break.

A few minutes later, normal conversation seems to resume and systems are ready for a new shower of nitrogen.