O OC CUP
THE HWBOT
OVERCLOCKING LEAGUES
First things first, let’s have a look at
the brief history of the overclocking
leagues at HWBOT. The (perhaps
arguable) fun of competitive
overclocking at HWBOT started
almost six and a half years ago back in
2006, on November 3rd to be precise.
The first revision of the HWBoints
(A collective term for everything
point related at HWBOT) - featured a
simple user and team ranking. The
first league was actually quite similar
to the leagues we have today. Only
slightly less complicated. The original
league was just the sum of all points,
nothing more and nothing less.
About three months later, on
February 11 2007, the second revision
of the HWBoints was introduced. The
first revision was mostly about finetuning what did not work well enough
at the launch. The revision included a
small rework of the points balance.
The third revision came much
later, on Christmas day 2009 and
featured significant changes affecting
the member ranking. The revision
included redefining the hardware
rankings in terms of cores rather than
sockets as well as giving more weight
to the highly competitive benchmark
rankings and limiting the amount of
global points that could contribute to
your personal ranking. Changing the
hardware rankings from a socketcentric to a core-centric structure
gave quite the boost to single GPU
overclocking. Before, dual GPU
graphics cards such as the Radeon
HD 3870X2 and GeForce GTX 295
were the best choice for competitive
overclockers.
Up until the fourth revision of
HWBOT, which came to life on June
4 2011, not much had changed to
the Teams League. Because of an
increasing amount of hardware
sharing accusations, the fourth
revision introduced team-based
benchmark rankings on which the
Teams League is now primarily
based. This new type of point
system, TeamPower Points, did
eliminate the effect of hardware
sharing significantly but also made
the Teams League a lot more
complicated. A second major change
in the fourth revision for HWBoints
was splitting up the member league
into three different versions:
Pro OC League, OC League and
Enthusiast League. The OC League
is pretty much what the previous
member leagues were, rewarding
the overclocking efforts with both
new and old hardware. The Pro OC
League was designed specifically to
separate the so-called Professional
overclockers, of which many were
unpaid but supported by vendors
with hardware, from those who
paid for everything from their
own pockets. The Enthusiast
League revolved (and continues to)
around overclocking with ambient
temperature cooling only and is
meant as an easy starting place for
new overclockers.
The new HWBoints revision targets
specifically the Pro OC League. It
leaves every other league unaffected.
TRANSFORMING PRO OC FROM A
LEAGUE TO A CUP – WHY?
Before we get into the details of how
to take part in the Pro OC Cup, let us
have a look at why the League had
to go. As the argument requires a
fundamental understanding of the
evolution of competitive overclocking,
both in general terms and HWBOT in
particular, I'll try to keep it short and
concise.
To make it very simple, the Pro
OC League had no appeal to, well,
anyone. None of the highest ranked
overclockers, the sponsor, the lessextreme overclocking enthusiasts,
Issue 24 | 2013 The OverClocker 27