Overdrive: Italy's Team Is Chosen

Give Us The Liquid Nitrogen, Now!

After a week spent preparing the venue, the hardware, and the liquid nitrogen, Saturday morning arrived and the Italian team was ready to host the group of competitors. Despite ugly weather, all of the competitors made it on time for a 10:00 AM start.

Only a few minutes were devoted to the introduction and other pleasantries, as the competitors were eager to get down to business. Very quickly thereafter, they got their hands on 230 liter liquid nitrogen canisters, filling their 10, 30, and 50-liter dewars. First, GiorgioPrimo and Leghorn, followed by F.O.G.N.A, C1rcu1tburn3r, and Principino84. Then Hiwa-Zilla-Qballe took his turn, and finally Wasky and Marco74 got their fill of liquid freeze.

Although identical components were used for each team, there are always differences at the transistor level affecting how far a given part will scale. These are imperceptible for most users, but very much apparent when you overclock competitively. The distribution of hardware, therefore, was handled by pure luck, using numbered cards and a draw.

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The guys then began to assemble their machines, install the operating system, and load various utilities and benchmarks, which took us to mid-afternoon. Optimizing the software was a very important step, because a streamlined system allows you to focus all the computing power on the test, then obtain low times or high scores, depending on the benchmark.

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Before moving to the benchmarks, the teams took a few minutes to mod their hardware, another essential step without which it would be impossible to achieve good results. Soldering iron in hand, they made the changes needed in order to deliver more voltage to important components, like the CPU and GPU. This sets the stage for increasing clock speeds, reducing the timing of memory, and making other changes necessary to get better performance.

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