On November 29th and 30th, we hosted the Italian leg of Tom’s Hardware’s overclocking contest. You can read more about the competition that saw the American team selected right here. We hosted four teams, each taking its hardware as far as it’d go using liquid nitrogen.

In order to finish the contest, the teams had to complete ten tests. Five of these were aimed at assessing the overclocking capabilities of CPU, motherboard, and memory. Those included PiFast, SuperPI 1M, SuperPI 32M, Wprime 32M, and Wprime 1024M. The other five factored i3D performance into the equation with Aquamark, 3DMark01, 3DMark03, 3DMark05, and 3DMark06.

The scoring system granted 100 points for first place, then 80, 60, and 40 points, respectively, for second, third, and fourth place finishes. The sum of each team’s points decided the winner.

In addition to taking the hardware to its limit, overclockers also had to pay heed to how aggressive they were being. Any burnt component resulted in a 5% penalty to the final points total.

Faced with the limitations already experienced by our US and Germany competitions, the teams were forced to make some compromises and tough choices in order to complete the battery of tests.

If you’d like a closer look at the hardware used in the Italian trials, check out The Hardware Behind Overdrive.