Extreme OC Show
A
MD’s original plan was to hold
an overclocking competition
between mainboard
manufacturers. As the
competition date drew nearer,
vendors began to worry
about their competitors. None of them
Ire really eager to compete in a public
environment as the stakes were too
high. No one wants to look bad in public.
The only way to look good is to make
sure you’re better than all the others and
as there can only be one winner, the odds
are stacked against you.
In the end, AMD changed the event
structure. The task for each team was
to hit 6.5GHz with Trinity and 7.5GHz
with Piledriver. This was much easier
said than done, but it did result in
reduced pressure for all involved. AMD
provided a total of six CPUs to each
of the teams to use during the event,
but everyone was allowed to use any
Piledriver or Trinity – including the ones
they pretested internally. Having seen
some of the test results, it seemed that
the none of the CPUs AMD provided was
any good so using a pretested sample
was the right choice for the vendors as
they attempted new records.
8GHZ FOR EVERYONE!
ASRock was represented by their
in-house God of Overclocking, “Nick
Shih”. Alongside Nick I found Kevin
Chen, one of Nick’s close friends and
the person who was present when
ASRock had their first Liquid Helium
session a couple of months ago.
According to Nick, the team did not
prepare that well for the event. Not
really a surprise as Nick has been and
continues to be very much focused his
brainchild, the Z77 OC Formula as well
as Intel’s upcoming Haswell platform.
Moreover as there is no overclocking
centric AMD motherboard from
ASRock, Nick is not focused on AMD
overclocking.
Unlike the other teams ASRock
had not yet put out any Piledriver
overclocking figures, so this public
demo was pretty much the first time
someone used an ASRock mainboard
to overclock a Piledriver CPU on
LN2. The final frequency of 8.06GHz
the team reached can therefore
be qualified as an achievement. I
don’t know if Nick will do further
in-house testing, but I am definitely
looking forward to future ASRock
overclocking results!
The least known overclocking team
was Biostar’s Boundless OCers.
According to AMD’s press release,
the team consisted of a couple
of BIOS, hardware and software
engineers, so the team consisted
of Biostar employees. No familiar
faces, so it was a challenge figuring
out how much knowledge and skill
the team really had. Interesting
side-note to the Biostar story is that
K|ngp|n dropped of one of his cooling
pots at the Biostar office the day
before the event – the same pot that
was used in the event. In any case,
Biostar attempted to hit the required
targets of 6.5G and 7.5G and that’s
exactly what they did.
Of all the teams, GIGABYTE took
the event the most serious. The
team modified both FM2 and AM3
mainboards by adding an LN2 mode
switch (set CPU to hold P-state), a vivid
display of preparation and dedication
to the event. Alongside the inevitable
Hicookie I found first-time live event
overclocker SDougal – Stew from
Gigabyte for the friends – and John
Lam from HKEPC, a close friend
of Hicookie. During the event, the
team managed to improve the Trinity
frequency record by almost 200MHz
as well as reach an impressive 8.4GHz
with the FX-8350. Cool!
If you want to try the LN2
modification at home, check out
the HWBOT forum thread for more
information (including a how-to
picture): “LN2 mode for GIGABYTE
A85X-UP4 and 990FXA-UD3 (for high
Trinity/Piledriver validations)” !
Having made quite a lot of noise
Issue 22 | 2012 The OverClocker 35