Overdrive Overclocking Finals: Day 1
The Top Overclockers Meet In Paris
Group photo: There are all the participants next to the hardware, just some minutes before the event started.
France--One Guy Was Late; They're Catching Up
The French team consists of two overclockers. Florian_76 arrived in Paris on Friday, like most of the other guys. However, his teammate Marmott missed his flight on Friday and had to come in Saturday on morning. As a result, the WR Team from France had to start 90 minutes later. Unfortunately, they had another issue, as they accidentally installed the 64-bit version of Windows Vista Ultimate. Since we need the same conditions for everyone we had to insist on using Vista-32.
Frankreich--Catching Up
The French WR Team checked the hardware first, as they wanted to be sure they wouldn't run into issues. There will be plenty of time to use liquid nitrogen. They decided to insulate the motherboards using varnish.
Taiwan--LN2 After Only Two Hours
The Taiwanese team CBB decided to focus on the processor. Their graphics board is cooled by a liquid cooling solution.
Taiwan--Liquid Cooling The Graphics Card
The Taiwanese team also was the first to clone its Windows Vista installation using Norton Ghost. They decided to do this so that they can restore the entire system installation within minutes in a worst-case scenario. Otherwise you'd have to reinstall Windows and drivers, which takes at least half an hour even on this hardcore systems.
The liquid cooling solution on the bottom of the photo looks home brew, but in fact it seems to be working great.
Germany--Diligently Preparing Hardware
The German team BenchBros started with carefully insulating the graphics card using rubber from Faber Castell. Usually this material is being used as rubber to remove pencil writing. Clearly, simple tools seem to be most efficient.
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Germany--Steady...
BenchBros from Germany takes a lot of time to prepare and to fix potential issues. Let's see if their scores will prove them right.
USA--Fixing Possible Issues Before They Arise
The US team IronMods had to spend some time to reattach the northbridge heat sink, which wasn't mounted well. It did not lay flat on the X58 chipset, which could have caused insufficient cooling at high clock speeds.
USA--Professional Test Bench
Team IronMods installed their test system onto an aluminum test bench, which they brought to the event. This is one of the most professional test benches we've seen, as it also include a 92 mm fan to cool the motherboard from the rear side of the PCB.
Italy--Thorough Component Checkups
MemoryExtreme Team Italy's Massimiliano spent time to check components carefully, then he installed Windows. The two team members found solder points to measure voltage of the key components on the motherboard. Finally, they did extensive test runs with the Kingston memory to find out the best combination of timings and clock speed ahead of the actual race for results.
Italy--Test Benches by DimasTech
The Italian team brought a test bench by DimasTech, which is a helpful tool for test engineers or overclockers.
Patrick Schmid was the editor-in-chief for Tom's Hardware from 2005 to 2006. He wrote numerous articles on a wide range of hardware topics, including storage, CPUs, and system builds.
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Once again I walk away from a Tom's "Pic" article thinking that......... Well I don't know what to think. How in the heck can you just have to put a caption under a pic and still screw that up.Like when you mentioned something about putting new grease on a NB heatsink , ummmmm that guy was insulating the socket. You must be great at something because you still have your job but I sure can't tell Pat. P.S. learn how to spellcheck , not even spell just spellchecker.Reply