QA
with Giorgio Primo
Full Name:
Massimiliano Calandrini
Country: Italy
What language(s) do you speak?
I speak Italian (my mother tongue),
English and Spanish.
On which forums do you spend most
of your time these days?
nexthardware forum which is actually
the best one focused on enthusiast
hardware and overclocking in Italy, of
course xtremesystems and hwbot.
As far as overclocker rankings are
concerned, do such things matter to
you or do you overclocking purely
for personal achievement?
Well, I would define myself as a
“hardware freak”. I mainly overclock
for myself as competition adds a lot of
salt to this sport. I really like the idea
of competing with people from the
other side of the world. The important
thing is to focus on a target score, not
just the highest one but to get a better
score than another guy with the same
hardware.
When did your interest in
overclocking start and how did it
start?
It was around 2004/2005 just trying
to extract more power from my
daily computer (ATI 9800 pro, AMD
Mobile AthlonXP 2600+, Abit NF7)
to play games. I then discovered
6 The OverClocker Issue 17 | 2011
water-cooling and phase-change at
which point, I met two other guys,
very crazy about hardware like me,
Leghorn and Giampa. We joined
together to form the memoryextreme
team. HWbot didn’t exist at that time
and we used to produce scores just
for the ORB at Futuremark and on
a Japanese site about superpi (rip
something....).Going from phase
change to LN2 was really fast.
At that time, we were the leaders
in the OC community in Italy and the
competition was directly with Kingpin,
Hipro5, Kinc and Shamino.
After a good few years spent
together, Giampa was increasingly
more involved with his website
(nexthardware.com) and leghorn was
too busy with his work. I stopped for
a while, but then I started over again
and I’m still here. There are a lot of
new good guys out there and I think
I’m one of the oldest, but I still like to
push hardware over the limit.
What is your single greatest or
most memorable overclocking
achievement ever?
I really cannot say which one, I feel
pretty good every time i beat the guy
that stands before me, every time I
get a really nice run. Every time I get
a session, I have a new target and if I
can reach it....well, that becomes my
newest, greatest achievement
What was your favourite era in
overclocking and how has it changed
since the early days?
About 4-5 years ago, (the AMD FX
A64 age) overclocking was a kind
of “esoteric” sport, very few people
used to partake in it. Everything