It’s always nice when a company genuinely cares about the products they put on the market. The features touted by flagship products can often go untested and blindly flaunted even when the companies are reputable and generally of the highest caliber. Today, Gigabyte proved that the products they offer and the features they promote perform precisely as advertised. At the Gigabyte Invitational Overclocking Tournament, the company went so far as to encourage 10 of the most skilled overclockers in the United States to absolutely ravage the hell out of their hardware.

The star of the show today was Gigabyte’s GA-X48T-DQ6 motherboard. Intel chipped in to the event in the form of 10 Core 2 Extreme QX9650 processors. All contestants had a standard hardware configuration, with 1200W Gigabyte Power supplies, a Gigabyte NVIDIA GeForce 9600GT video card, 2GB of Corsair Dominator DDR3-2000, and a 250GB hard drive from Western Digital. Windows XP was the OS of choice, and a variety of overclocking tools were used throughout the competition. The 10 renown overclockers had a set amount of time to submit scores for each of four benchmarks.

SuperPI 1M was the first benchmark, and was probably chosen primarily so the contestants could show their CPU overclocking prowess. The highest clock speed we saw today was 5.8GHz (QX9650 stock at 3.0GHz), but the motherboard gave way shortly after a successful boot into Windows. It is excessively difficult to keep all components stable when CPU speeds reach this level, especially when liquid nitrogen is being used. The extremely low temperatures associated with this cooling method tend to cause board components surrounding the CPU socket to freeze over. Even with the extreme conditions, only about 3 replacement motherboards were needed throughout the day.

The highest benchmark stable clock speed we observed today was 5.72 GHz, obtained by Mark of Xtreme Systems during the SuperPI test. Every other test in the suite had at least partial dependence on GPU performance. In our opinion this was the only low point of the day’s events. It became quite clear while watching the results pour in the there was a tremendous disparity in the ability of the graphics chips to clock to certain speeds. Since all competitors were using more or less the same methods for video card overclocking, the only variable would be the potential of the individual cards. While it is true that there was also variation in the clock ceilings of the processors being used, they were all fairly capable. Although a CPU or GPU may be manufactured right next to another and roll off the assembly line in sequence, that the overclocking headroom on each of these processors is equal is far from guaranteed.

We have already published a number of articles chronicling some of the day’s events and reporting the final scores for each round of testing. So instead of just regurgitating that information herein, we decided it would be best to come at you with some detailed specifications.

On Mark’s winning SuperPI 1M run, his processor was clocked at 5720MHz, which was obtained using a 13x multiplier and 440MHz FSB. Many contestants opted for a 14x multiplier and lower FSB frequencies. Mark had his processor running above 1.9V to achieve this clock speed. When Ross pushed his system to the brink in Aquamark, his processor was running at 5455MHz (13×419MHz), while his GPU core was clocked to 867MHz, graphics memory at 1153MHz (1000MHz stock), and shader clocks at 2362MHz (1625MHz stock). Finally, when Mark destroyed the competition in 3DMark06, he did so with his processor clocked at 5400MHz (13×420) and graphics card at 904/1172/2369MHz for the GPU, memory, and shaders respectively.

The event was not without its share of quirky happenings either. Probably most prominent was side-effects of high nitrogen concentration. Doctors use Nitrogen gas (Nitrous Oxide) as an anesthetic and it has become known over the years as funny gas. This effect was not lost on the LN2 jockeys, who happily – perhaps too happily – dished out large helpings of LN2 into the thermoses of the competitors. Of course nobody really cared that this was happening, as it made for a much livelier event.

When extreme overclocking is taking place, the presence of precision machined, custom CPU blocks and very low temperatures is a given. However, there were other tools being used today that we didn’t totally expect to see. At one point, contestant Danny pulled out a benzene torch to heat up the CPU block. This was quite a site, considering the goal of this event seemed to be exploiting the enabling properties of very low temperatures. Hair dryers were also used for this cause. Taking the cake in terms of unique equipment, however, was Mark’s old Delta screamer fan, that was easily the loudest singular device in the room. The 80mm fan that pushes 80cfm of air (powerful enough to push itself off the ground) at close to infinity RPM and 60dBA commanded attention and made for some very cool looking flows of nitrogen vapor off of the nearby CPU and GPU blocks. Also worth mention in this department was the old AMD Athlon 2400 XP processor perched on the workbench of Chris, who has kept the first processor he ever bought as a good luck charm for his overclocking ventures.

Besides the main stage of overclocking, there were several other interesting items on display at the event. Gigabyte had three of their cases on site, including one with an integrated and expandable water cooling system. Extra loops and cooling apparatuses can be added to the system by simply plumbing the parts and opening a valve. This could be a large step forward for those looking to take a smaller step into the DIY water cooling space. Gigabyte also had all three of its P45-based motherboard offerings on display, and Corsair had some of its high-speed Dominator memory at the back of the room. Easily the coolest thing, however, was the two case mods that TiTON from Iron Mods brought in. The first mod was for the Iron Man Mark 1 complete with the mini arc reactor in the “chest” part of the front bezel. The second mod was definitely the coolest thing any of had ever seen in our lives: a real-life, working computer version of the sentry gun and dispenser from Valve’s enormously popular Team Fortress 2. Of course, the sentry gun did not shoot bullets, and the dispenser did not dish out health and ammunition, but the presence of cables, dead bullet cartridges, and realistic design elements made this case mod so utterly impressive that we simply could not resist the urge to pound on it with our imaginary wrenches. Ton from Iron Mods is actually local to the FPSLabs office, so there is a good chance we will have him in for an interview or pay him a visit to observe his case mod techniques.

Overall the day was enormously entertaining and resulted in several new contacts that should eventually produce some exciting new content for FPSLabs. Make sure you don’t just read through all of these boring articles without gazing your eyes upon the pictures from the event!

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