FEATURE // GALAX OVERCLOCKING CARNIVAL
During our interview it was also revealed that GALAX would in future possibly release Hall of Fame gaming peripherals in their classic HOF white . Thus far there ’ s no timeline and don ’ t take it as gospel , but the mere mention of it should get some discerning enthusiasts excited at the prospect .
Back un to the overclocking event , the journey for the finalists really began on the Thursday ( 23rd ) with the twelve competitors arriving in Thailand and making their way to the centrally located Novotel Hotel . A great time for friends old and new to catch up and throughout the afternoon and evening . After all , a number of these competitors have history and friendships have formed over this addictive hobby , if you will - Sport .
Friday was a peaceful day , allowing the overclockers to recover from any jetlag they may have had from their flights . A briefing was held mid-afternoon where they were told the hardware that would be used - a Core i7-7740X processor , any X299 motherboard ( everyone chose to use the ASUS Rampage VI Apex ), an Antec 1300w PSU , 32 GB GLALX HOF DDR4-
4133 memory , a GALAX HOF 512 GB SSD and ( perhaps most importantly and the most exciting component ) a GALAX HOF GeForce GTX 1080 Ti OC Lab Edition graphics card .
The GALAX HOF OC Lab Edition is a card that is engineered from the ground up to be the ultimate expression of the GTX 1080 Ti GPU , ready for competitive overclocking with liquid nitrogen out the box . This card has all limitations removed , allowing the overclockers to push the silicon to its limits without the need to worry about power or any other limitations that exist on every other GTX 1080 Ti .
The power circuitry on this card has no problem providing the 750 watts or more which is sometimes drawn when frequencies approaching 2.6GHz or higher . To put that into perspective , the regular Founders Edition GTX 1080 Ti is rated for a 250W TDP , so as you can see . The Hall of Fame OC LAB Edition cards allow for three times the stock TDP of the GTX 1080 Ti . This is achieved through a 12-layer PCB and a 16 + 3 phase VRM - two things that make it clear that the card receives
praises , not because of its aesthetic qualities , but because it proves itself where the rubber meets the road .
Saturday was the main event , which saw visitors queuing up outside the entrance well before opening time . GOC started at 10AM that morning , as the overclockers prepared and insulated their cards and motherboards for use under liquid nitrogen .
The competition would run for six hours with four different benchmarks , which could be run in any order , but with a maximum time limit of 90 minutes per benchmark . With GALAX products being used where possible , it makes sense that the four benchmarks to be used would test the overclockers ’ ability to tweak them - namely the RAM and graphics card . The benchmarks to be run were Geekbench3 Multi Core , 3DMark Time Spy , 3DMark Time Spy Extreme ( Where only the graphics sub score would count ) and GPUPI 1B .
For the uninitiated , Geekbench3 is a synthetic test which runs a series of benchmarks using real-world scenarios on the CPU , while 3DMark is a graphics-intensive benchmark that
14 The OverClocker Issue 43 | 2018