Happy New Year!

As 2011 draws to a close, all of the Editors of Overclockers.com (Brett (splat), Jeremy (hokiealumnus), Joe (Earthdog), Matt B (I.M.O.G.), Matt G (MatNo5ss), Matt R (mdcomp) and I (David)) would like to wish all of our readers, writers and friends a very happy new year! Overclockers.com is almost exclusively staffed by volunteers (with one exception) and we rely on volunteer writers to keep the stream of original reviews and articles flowing.

Looking Back

The past year has been interesting for overclockers. Intel released their Sandy Bridge platform, with impressive benchmarks but slightly formulaic overclocking, followed by a motherboard recall due to faulty SATA ports. Sandy Bridge was followed by the six-core monster that is Sandy Bridge-E. AMD  had mixed fortunes; they released their new Bulldozer architecture, which broke clockspeed records, exceeding clockspeeds of 8.4 GHz, but still failing to impress performance-wise. Our own Matt B managed to hit 8 GHz. The release of the Llano series of APUs was far more successful (while remaining overclockable), representing the first serious on-chip graphics solution to hit the market. Futuremark released PC Mark 7 and Overclockix was revived. Core Temp (written by forum member ‘The Coolest’ finally hit version 1.0).

i7 2600K & i7-3960X
i7 2600K & i7-3960X

AMD FX-8150 CPU
AMD FX-8150 CPU

AMD FX-8150 CPU Pins
AMD FX-8150 CPU Pins

It was also a busy year for the site, as we launched the first Overclockers Choice awards, resulting in awards for some of the best hardware manufacturers out there, and ran events at Microcenter stores for the first time. The second benchmarking party took place this June, in Philadelphia, and plans are being made to keep this event a regular occurrence. Our guides to benchmarking and our buyers guide continued to be updated, guiding new (and old!) members through the processes of benchmarking and PC buying. Matt B. represented Overclockers.com at CES in 2011. We were pleased to welcome Joe (Earthdog) and Matt G. (MatNo5ss) onto the editorial team, in recognition of their hard work and dedication.

The year 2011 saw us publish a large number of reviews including:

There were also big changes for some of our Overclockers forum members: Matt B, one of the lead editors, secured a job working for INet Interactive, who own the site. Trents, DaveHCYJ, nzaneb, ghost_recon88, SpeeDj, Navig, rge, RGone, Stratus_ss and Janus67 were promoted to Senior Member, while RollingThunder was promoted to Super Moderator. It was a busy year for mbentley (yet another Matt!) who was promoted to moderator then Administrator in quick succession.

Looking Forward

While it’s been a busy year in 2011, the year 2012 holds a lot for Overclockers.com. In January we will send several of our staff to CES in Las Vegas, which should allow us to further establish our position as one of the best computing hobbyist and overclocking sites on the internet. Our contacts with manufacturers grow firmer each year so that we can cover the latest and most important hardware releases on the date of release.

However, none of this would be possible without you, the reader. We’d like to thank you again for supporting the site, and for giving us a reason to do what we do. We all hope you had a very pleasant Christmas (feel free to brag in the comments about what exciting hardware you managed to get your hands on) and have a happy and successful 2012.

As the Scottish saying goes: “lang may yer lum reek”.

David

About David 21 Articles
I am an Overclockers.com Editor and OCForums Super Moderator. I help prepare articles for publication, as well as writing the odd article, news piece or review myself. I'm very keen on maintaining a high quality of writing in the articles on Overclockers.com, and emulating the objectivity and clear writing style of scientific journals. If you're writing for Overclockers.com and need some help with preparing your piece, or presenting data, please feel free to email me.I'm a chemist by trade, having completed a degree at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland in 2008. I'm currently studying towards a PhD at the University of Strathclyde (Glasgow, Scotland) in Physical Organic Chemistry on the topic of substrate structure/activity relationships in ruthenium-alkylidene catalysed olefin ring-closing metathesis. In my spare time I like to relax with a book or browse the forums.

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