Benching Contest Ideas and Volunteers wanted.

Now that the marathon benching contest is over, we are open to any ideas for challenges or contests. I would like to do a large event open to everyone, perhaps a forum wars type event too. So submit your ideas for that as well. If you have an idea or challenge you can post it here.

Volunteers to help organize and run the contests are welcome also.

Anyone that would like to donate hardware or other item for a contest giveaway, please post.
If anyone has industry contacts and would like to arrange a sponsor for a piece of hardware for a future contest, it would be welcomed.


As a side note, I would like to thank BMWBaxter for conducting the marathon benching contest that recently finished. I appreciate his time and effort put forth to run the contest month after month. Also, thanks to those that donated items to be given away as prizes.
congrats and good work to the winners.

Yes thanks to all those involved, I have a lot of fun with the Marathons. I'd be willing to help in any way I can Buggy, let me know what you need but obviously Google docs isn't it.

If anyone has a favorite banchmark and wants to challenge everyone let me know. Could be an intel air 2d or a 3d bench with AMD CPU etc. Figure out rules and let me know. It's just for fun.

There's BlackHole which I have been messing with lately, it's a bit boring though. I just can't seem to find anything that helps aside from CPU speed. Also it doesn't garner any points from the Bot.

Never was involved in a contest here. However if I can be of any help let me know.

Whatever the next one is, limit cooling to ambient. Most here do not use subzero, but those that do, in an unlimited format like the past contest was, can have an unfair advantage over those that do not.

I'd like to see it 'bot (boints!) oriented as much as possible, but am certainly open to others!

Agree, the guys on cold would own this


A few ways to even the playing field would be to set a clock limit that is reachable with ambient cooling, also you could limit the number of cores.

Like Primes and Vantage for example would be owned by Enthusiast level chips creating an uneven playing field

Say like 4.5 Ghz 4c4t would open the competion to i5's and up.
Of course this would only effet multi threaded bench's

Or you could have two catagories, cold and ambient with unlimited clocks and cores. The down side to this though is overclockers with a golden chip typically dominate these types of competitions, sort like on the Bot, tough to compete with guys using cherry picked ES chips and factory binned stix

However it ends up being formated I am sure everyone will have fun

It's tough because you can't please everyone all the time. I blame AMD?

EarthDog said:

It's tough because you can't please everyone all the time. I blame AMD?

Click to expand...

Don't hate the player, hate the game.

Could cap Intel clocks at 4GHz and anything-goes for AMD chips

What about 3D ?

could run heats, points based upon placing order

1st 20 point

2nd 17 point

3rd 14 points

4th 11 points

5th 9 points

6th 7 points

7th 5 points

8th 3 points

9th 2 points

10th 1 point


or something like that ???

Hmmm.... A mix of 3D and 2D benching sounds fun.

There's a huge problem with 3D, if you don't own a titan/780ti then save your time and do something else, the only way to do 3D fairly is identical hardware, FACT !

keny said:

There's a huge problem with 3D, if you don't own a titan/780ti then save your time and do something else, the only way to do 3D fairly is identical hardware, FACT !

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Not to mention it's hard to make everyone to use the same hardware even if it's cheap.
We can make old hardware competition like P4 or A64 but many forum members would like to forget about old hardware and test something new.

It's really hard to make anything that would be good for both AMD and Intel users. We could count AMD threads/2 so 4 thread APU/FX could compete with i3. Still in 1 thread benchmarks i3 would be much better.

The same as for earlier competitions we have to make something available for as many forum members as it's possible.

- no sub 0 cooling
- clocks limited to 3, 4 or 4.5GHz ( depends from tested CPU generation ) or limited by cooling type but it's hard to check what was really used
- can be IGP competition for both AMD and Intel
- can be PCMark competition as it depends from all system, not only CPU or GPU, parts of PCM08 are free
- can be memory bandwidth competition ( I don't have to take part in that )
- can be 2 categories - AMD and Intel and every user can post in both categories but can get points only for one of them each stage
- we can use any benchmarks, not related to hwbot too

It's not hard to make point system or anything else but the worst part is to pick benchmarks as most are running better on Intel and some are running much better or Nvidia or AMD gfx cards. Like when you have R9 290X then you for sure win Heaven while GTX780Ti owners will win any Catzilla test.

If competitions were really popular then I bet we could find sponsors for rewards. So far it's running mainly among benching team members.
I think we could move competitions to more visible place like when we make CPU contest then make sticky in CPU section, when we make GPU then post it in AMD/Nvidia section. I just feel that many users still can't find our competitions.

Woomack said:

If competitions were really popular then I bet we could find sponsors for rewards. So far it's running mainly among benching team members.
I think we could move competitions to more visible place like when we make CPU contest then make sticky in CPU section, when we make GPU then post it in AMD/Nvidia section. I just feel that many users still can't find our competitions.

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That's not a bad idea at all Woomack, just might get more people's attention and they won't feel like they have to be part of the "team" to compete.

Bottom line here gents is for a contest to actually be a contest you have to have a starting line that is equal. IMO that is an imposibility with the diverse hardware that everone has.

The problem with making hardware catagories is you will struggel to get enough members in each catagory to make it an actual contest. What a about a team appraoch ?

For instance 4 man teams

AMD Quad
AMD dual
Intel 4c8t
Intel 2c4t

Or however it makes sense based on those who want to compete

Each heat would consit of a combined score betwen the catagories.
You could get a thread going for all those intrested to sign up with there given hardware, once you have enough members and the hardware diversity required teams could be formed either by members or randomly by a mod

This could be a fun appraoch , however you would still need to put in clock limitations so the contest is viable for the majority as opposed to the minority

3D wise, do a challenge with HD4350s or something. Super super cheap, but still PCIe and thus usable on modern HW.

Witchdoctor said:

Bottom line here gents is for a contest to actually be a contest you have to have a starting line that is equal. IMO that is an imposibility with the diverse hardware that everone has.

The problem with making hardware catagories is you will struggel to get enough members in each catagory to make it an actual contest. What a about a team appraoch ?

For instance 4 man teams

AMD Quad
AMD dual
Intel 4c8t
Intel 2c4t

Or however it makes sense based on those who want to compete

Each heat would consit of a combined score betwen the catagories.
You could get a thread going for all those intrested to sign up with there given hardware, once you have enough members and the hardware diversity required teams could be formed either by members or randomly by a mod

This could be a fun appraoch , however you would still need to put in clock limitations so the contest is viable for the majority as opposed to the minority

Click to expand...

I like this but a little more simple... Teams, but someone has AMD and someone Intel... same for GPU's?

EarthDog said:

I like this but a little more simple... Teams, but someone has AMD and someone Intel... same for GPU's?

Click to expand...

That's an interesting thought.

AMD/ATI GPUs do bench differently from an Nvidia and also give different results based on the bench used with each. It's the same basic thing as how well each does between folding and bitcoin mining - Nvidia rules folding while AMD rules mining between the two makes. The exact bench used with each one must be considered to make it competitive yet fun. You can go with benches that works best with each or benches that they don't fare so well with as a real challenge - Either way it would work.

The diversity of what each person has to bench with cannot be helped and that's a real problem with trying to come up with something that's "Fair" yet competitive. I don't see a real way to even things out completely but it's still doable if simply wanting to bench.