A Forum Wars Journal Part 1: Stock Scores

Uh, but before that, we have to take care of the people asking, “What is Forum Wars?” I could go into detail, but luckily for me someone already did that. You can read Sno.lcn’s article about all of that, Forum Wars (Winter Warz) Begins Feb. 1.

As for this article, I’m going to be posting what is actually done in Forum Wars. This will be my third time competing, so I make roughly 40% less newbie mistakes than the first timers. Unfortunately, this will be my first time using dry ice for Forum Wars, and the second time ever using it, so I’ll probably be making a lot of mistakes. Anyway, on to the hardware.

This time around I will be using a combination of my daily hardware and other parts I have laying around. Unfortunately, between this I didn’t quite have enough to make two competitive setups. Luckily, I happen to be on the most generous team competing in forum wars, so I’ve picked up enough parts to hopefully make a nice, medium sized splash in the teams I’ll be placed in. Setup #1 will be my old standby, the Q6600, paired with a GTX 260. Setup #2 is a Celeron E3200 along with a Radeon 4870. Cooling will be dry ice on both the CPU and GPU, via a Chilly1 GPU pot purchased from the classifieds section (Thanks ghost!) and an all-aluminum Dunik CPU pot, which happens to be somewhere in shipping at the moment.

With all of that out of the way, the first round of Forum Wars; the stock scores. I can hype this all I want but it’s pretty dull, all you do is turn everything back down to stock speeds and run the benchmarks. Setup #1 can be found here, and setup #2 here. If you’ll notice, I still managed to forget the timestamp on setup #1’s wprime entry. With stock scores, you can turn in a 0 for scores if necessary, but mistakes like this make for large headaches in the overclocked portion. Nothing like using up all of your DICE or LN2 and find out your score doesn’t count because you forgot to timestamp it.

That’s basically all there is for stock scores. Things get much more interesting next week when the overclocked portion begins. Computers get moved on top of motherboard boxes, everything gets covered in colored art eraser (for good luck, of course!) and we torture electronics until March. Stuff also breaks from time to time, mainly because people forget their art eraser.

Stay tuned!

–KonaKona (OC Forums Benching Team)