Overclockers.com Benchmarking Party – Summary and Pictures

The weekend of the party has passed and the event itself is over, but the party has just begun for the Overclockers.com Benchmarking team! Everyone whom attended had a blast meeting each other and pounding on computer hardware throughout the weekend. With mountains of hardware, 720 Liters of Liquid Nitrogen to burn, and support from leading hardware manufacturers Corsair and Gigabyte. Having a great time was guaranteed!

Event Introduction

The Overclockers.com Benchmarking team competes on HWBot.org and is currently ranked #17th in the world amongst hundreds of international teams.  Put simply, they run their computers as fast as their hardware permits (far beyond spec), run benchmarks to gauge their computing power, and earn points for beating other benchmark submissions.  The team met for a Liquid Nitrogen party in Tyler, TX last weekend. Our goals were simple: Meet our teammates and online friends in person, learn how to use LN2, and grab whatever points and records we could on hwbot.org. Prior to the weekend, only one in attendance had used LN2 before. By the end of the weekend, we all wondered how we could live with ourselves using anything less again.

Manufacturer Support

Thanks go out to Corsair and Gigabyte for sending along hardware to support our Overclocking efforts and the event! Gigabyte sent an X58a-ud3r, 3 P55A-ud7‘s, and a GTX580, while Corsair sent their powerhouse AX1200 PSU.

Event Background

If you missed the event, you can get up to speed on what you missed across the following links:

• Announcements – 1st Annual Benching Team Party and Overclockers Benching Party I: The Lineup
• Video Libraries – Live party broadcasts recorded on Overclockers’ Live and Overclockers’ Joe
• Social Media – Live event updates were published on Facebook and Twitter

Thank You Attendees and Viewers

Before we go any further, I’d like to ensure we don’t forget the silent contributors. Those individuals who toiled quietly in the shadows. Those that made the party that much more special while not reaping any rewards or garnering any spotlight. With events like this one it is hard to quantify just how important key individuals are who work without rest in the background, making sure the small things are taken care of, ensuring everyone else can simply focus on the task at hand and have a good time. With that said, let’s raise up and tip our glasses to Dejo’s fridge in the back of the shop! You cooled our beers, and warmed our hearts!

To those who booked flights or packed up their cars to make the trip – thank you for going out of your way to be part of an event I’ll remember forever, as will many others. It was great meeting every one of you, enjoying some drinks together, and I’m proud to have spent a weekend with such an outstanding group of guys. We sacrificed time from our busy lives and we sacrificed hardware in the pursuit of higher scores, and we came away with memories to last a life time. Thanks guys!

Let’s not forget those who joined us from home. I’ve mentioned how much fun those in attendance had, but that only accounts for a small fraction of all those who participated in the weekend. I’d like to offer a serious thanks to all of our community who joined us from home via Livestream. I had a great time chatting with you from the party and it was a lot of fun keeping everyone up to speed. While we had hoped those who couldn’t make it would join in on the live video feed and catch us in the chat, the actual amount of community interest simply blew us away! To give you an idea of just how much interest there was, here is a quick highlight of our live streaming video stats from the weekend:

• Total minutes of live video broadcast – 1978 minutes
• Total minutes of live video consumed by viewers – 320,000+ minutes
• Peak simultaneous livestream viewing sessions – 450+ viewers
• Peak bandwidth in a single hour consumed by viewers at home – 90.11GB

Statistics – quite impressive! But let’s move along to more exciting things…

Pictures From the Party

Words alone can’t do the event justice, so if you don’t have time to checkout some of the hours of live video linked above, check out some of the great pictures we captured.

Videos From the Party

A couple scanning room shots to get a feel for our setup:

Brolloks in the drivers seat for some 3D benching:

Muddocktor trying to get the last drops from one of the 180L dewars:

Xoke benching wPrime:

Dolk preparing a GTX580 voltage hardmod:

Icebob and Dolk attempting to get some voltage readings:

Voidn, Moocow, and Muddocktor collaborating on a 980X running wPrime:

Dolk getting down to business. This is his rig that hit 6890Mhz in CPU-Z, powered by a Corsair AX1200:

HWBot Scores

These are the scores obtained and turned into HWBot from the Party.

Dejo – 980X, Gigabyte GTX580 – 65 Global HWBot points

• 3DMark03, 3DMark05, 3DMark06, 3DMark Vantage, Aquamark

Moocow – 980X, Radeon 4870×2 – 4.2 Global, 53.6 Hardware HWBot points

• 3DMark 2001, 3DMark05, 3DMark06, 3DMark Vantage

Brolloks – W3680, E8600, Gigabyte GTX580, Radeon 4890 – 47.9 Global, 23.3 Hardware HWBot points

• 3dMark 2001, 3DMark Vantage, wPrime32m, wPrime32m, SuperPi

Xoke – 1090T BE, 555 BE, GTX 480 – 20.6 Global, 28.6 Hardware HWBot points

• 3DMark Vantage, CPU-Z, SuperPi, SuperPi32m, SuperPi32m, wPrime32m, wPrime32m, wPrime32m, wPrime1024m, wPrime1024m, wPrime1024m

Voidn – E8500 – 14.4 Hardware HWBot points

• CPU-Z

Dolk – 1090T BE, Corsair AX1200 – 1.2 Global, 8.6 Hardware HWBot points

• wPrime32m, 6890Mhz in CPU-Z (screenshot, no validation)

Earthdog – i7 920, Gigabyte X58A-UD3R – 6 Global, 75.2 Hardware HWBot points

• CPU-Z, SuperPi, PiFast, wPrime32m

Icebob – w3680, Gigabyte GTX 580 – 5.2 Global, 2.5 Hardware HWBot points

• 3DMark03, 3DMark Vantage

Muddocktor – i7 980X – Unknown

• Scores pending submission

Wrapping It Up

All things said and done, everyone had an absolute blast at the party and it will be a weekend we remember forever. On behalf of the team here at Overclockers.com thanks again to Corsair and Gigabyte for supporting our weekend. The great hardware you sent added to everyone’s fun, and as can be seen above, we posted some great scores on it! For our readers, find more media covering this event and future events at the following links!

• Overclockers.com Facebook – Photo Album
• Livestream Recorded Live Video – Overclocker’s Live and Overclocker’s Joe
• Overclockers.com Twitter
• Overclockers.com Youtube

– I.M.O.G.