QA
Knut-Eirik “Knopflerbruce” Baade
Country Name and City:
Norway and Oslo
What language(s) do you speak?
Norwegian and English
Your nickname “Knopflerbruce”, how
did that come about and how does one
even pronounce that? (Always had a
hard time with it)
Before I started overclocking, I started
downloading live music from my
favourite artists, Mark Knopfler and
Bruce Springsteen. When I registered
on a couple of forums and torrent
trackers I needed a nickname, so I
picked that one as it sounded better
than the other possible combinations.
I wish I came up with something else
for this hobby! It’s not that hard to
pronounce, the k is silent, and apart
from that it’s straight forward. You
still sound like Nigel Thornberry if you
try it, though (LOL)
When did you start overclocking
seriously or rather competitively
for points? Is overclocking solely for
competitive purposes or do you take
part in it for “fun” mainly?
It’s hard to give an exact date, but I
guess I got hooked when me and a
mate tried to cool down a WC loop
by using frozen pork chops found in
my mom’s fridge, trying to get some
results from one of my first CPUs; a
very good AMD Opteron 175 - With
the sole purpose of seeing how high
I could get on the HWBot rankings.
I’m thinking it was in the spring of
2007. My motivation has always been
to compete with other people as
the competitive part of this game is
6 The OverClocker Issue 24 | 2013
everything to me. I’m not having fun if I
don’t get points or silverware after I’ve
finished benching a CPU.
Which is your favourite benchmark if
any and what is your least favourite
and why?
Tough one! Right now I like the
wPrimes the most, followed by
cinebench (most likely because of the
servers I’ve bought). In the beginning
it was CPUZ and Superpi 1m. I really
don’t like PCMark Vantage, as I bench
a lot of older parts and I run into the
single core bug very often (benchmark
stops randomly after a subtest, run it
a lot of times and eventually you’ll get
a score).
Share with us your thoughts on the
new 3DMark and if you will Catzilla.
I can’t – never ran those two, as I do
not bench high end GPUs (or barely
GPUs at all).
What was it that got you started in
overclocking?
An excellent, randomly bought CPU.
The first CPU I bought was an AMD
Athlon X2 3800+ OEM and I pushed it
to 2.9GHz rock stable at stock voltage
and crazy high temps with a Zalman
cooler. I googled the batch and it
seemed like CCBIE 0608BPMW was
the one everyone was looking for back
then, so I was very happy. A couple of
months later I started buying other
chips on eBay to see if they were
better
and things ‘exploded’ after
a while.
When you started overclocking which
forums did you spend your time on
mostly? Has that changed now many
years into the extreme hobby?
In the very beginning I think it was XS,