This has to be the classic extreme
overclocking shot that every overclocker on
the planet worth their salt has taken.
No idea what we were watching
here but there was music and
dancing involved, soothing.
2nd runner up team Joana and ryba.
Overall winners and Moa 2012
Champions: OC_Windforce
and LittleBoy. There was
some Gangnam style dancing
involved soon after this.
1st runner up team big
Splave and Romdominance.
HW GURUs who won the first round,
followed closely by Team USA and
then Team_MPBK. This was in some
ways a testament to the right choice
of benchmarks for the platform or
the other way around. Regardless, at
this point it was very interesting as
it was too early to tell who would be
the winners but the top three teams
seemed to have been sorted.
As with all live overclocking
competitions, nothing is decided by the
first benchmark and the remainder of
the day proved this as the competitors
moved to the 3D benchmarks.
First up was 3DMark03, not
everyone’s favourite, but certainly not
hated by anyone. Despite its age, it
has scaled pretty well with advancing
hardware, striking the right balance
between graphics and host processing
power. Once again, the choice of
benchmarks proved to be sound as
Team USA scored the highest with a
score of 163,273, followed closely by
the Polish duo ASD Crew and finally
the Korean Team.
Out of the fifteen teams around
only five managed scores above
the 160K mark and with that kind of
spread in performance it was a truer
representation on the overclocking
pedigree of each team as a combined
effort than in any of the other two
benchmarks. With the fastest SuperPi
32M time, HW GURUS were leading
with only the USA team scoring higher
than them in 3DMark03.All things
seemed to be going well and with just
one more benchmark to go, the win
was within reach.
There were two other teams
that were close to the 160K mark
in 3DMark03 and that was Team
Indonesia – JagatReview-Binus-CE
with 159,554 and the Australian/New
Zealand team with 159,713. In each
case a slightly stronger CPU would
have seen them break into the top
five, alas it seemed it wasn’t’ meant
to be. Still, not all was lost because
3DMark11 was still to come and
because of the result weighting of this
benchmark, the competition was still
open to any number of teams that had
submitted scores that were sufficient
enough to keep them in the running.
The third and final benchmark
changed everything. 3DMark11, easily
the most GPU bound benchmark of the
lot was what eventually settled what
had otherwise been a tight competition
amongst the top five. The HW GURUS
team that had looked so promising
were let down by their result only
managing to score a respectable but
nonetheless uncompetitive 14,936.
With such a strong showing in Super
Issue 21 | 2012 The OverClocker 37