Eric Garay

How about winning the 2009 GIGABYTE Overclocking Championship this past weekend. I’ve seen LN2 events take place, but never got up close and personal. These guys put a lot of time and thought in to how they’re going to beat the guy next to them.

I went to LA for the GIGABYTE Open Overclocking Championship 2009 event. Friday night they were still setting up when I managed to sneak in to check out what kind of hardware they would be using ahead of time. There were 13 stations set up with all the hardware needed to build a respectable Intel I7 based system including a Solid State Drive.

Saturday morning, the competition started with numbers being drawn so that the seating would be random. After a little waiting, everyone went in to see what they’d be using. At that point, everyone broke out their special cooling blocks called “pots” which replace the video card and CPU coolers.

During the next couple hours, everyone assembled their systems and made all kinds of preliminary tweaks in hopes of gaining an edge. At that point, everyone started booting up their systems filled with LN2, sending small clouds of evaporation across the tables. It was like being in an overclocker’s mad-house laboratory.

The first two hour contest was to see how high they could overclock their CPU and memory in order to calculate Super Pi the fastest. Fugger (a very well known elite overclocker) managed to tweak his machine enough to produce the quickest time of 30.625 seconds. However, Fugger already has a spot for the World’s Championship in Taiwan. Another elite named Miahallen produced the second fastest time of 30.969 seconds which actually put him in first place.

Part two of the competition was to see who could produce the highest 3DMark scores. This time around, lady luck smiled on two new faces. Sno-Jnc had an exemplary GTX 260 that overclocked nicely securing him second place. Maxi produced a score very close, but was just enough to achieve 3rd place in the final test.

Here you can see Sno.Jnc (left), Miahallen (middle), and Maxi (right) enjoying a little victor’s tonic. Each one received all the components needed to build an elite Intel I7 system. Miahallen just happened to get GIGABYTE’s top of the line EX58-Extreme and Intel I7 965 processor.

Some of the highest overclocked I7 965 3.2GHz processors reached 5.3 GHz by keeping temperatures around -65 Celcius. That’s cold! Not everyone had success. A few participants had processors and video cards that weren’t quite as capable of overclocking as the rest which really comes down to the luck of the draw. The same happens to the rest of us on air and watercooled computers. Rather than just give up, do a little research if you want the best hardware for extreme.

The GIGABYTE Overclocking event was quite interesting and fun all as the same time. If you have a chance to attend any kind of overclocking event in your area, do it. You can learn just about everything needed to ensure your own success by watching and asking questions. Start off with air or water cooled overclocking first till you’re confident you can handle any build. Who knows, you might just win the next fastest computer system in the world.

It happens to all of us at some point. We added or replaced the computer’s memory and now there are problems. These could include random restarts, system freezing, program crashes, and/or the system refuses to boot up. This doesn’t always mean your memory is incompatible. It just means your system, particularly your motherboard, aren’t agreeing with some internal setting. However, it’s possible that the memory has internal issues of its own. There are some steps you can take to get your system running without taking it to a repair shop.

First, assuming you’re having one or more of the issues above, follow these steps.
1. Install only 1 memory stick. This helps eliminates any variables.

2. Clear or Reset your motherboard’s CMOS (BIOS). It might be a button or a Jumper that needs moved and then put back. Start with a clean slate, so to speak.

3. Power up the system. If it boots successfully, you can enter the BIOS by depressing the DEL (Delete Key) and set any XMP or SLI Memory profiles if your board supports this feature. Otherwise, save, exit the BIOS, and power down.

4. Install the rest of the memory and proceed in to Windows.

If after these steps your system can’t boot, you’ll have to test each stick 1 at a time repeating the steps. This will help determine if there’s a bad memory stick. This is something that commonly happens among memory kits where there’s more than one module.

If you’re trying to install several different brands of memory, it’s going to be a bit more difficult getting your system stable. Mix and matching memory can limit chances for success. You’ll have to get more advanced and manually set the memory timings and voltage to match the “slowest” memory module. Your memory timings will look something like this: 5-5-5-15. Memory voltage is often called, VDIMM in the BIOS.

Incompatible memory typically causes a system to fail to boot because your motherboard just doesn’t understand how to use it. Depending on the number or memory slots on your board, you can always try switching slots. A BIOS update might resolve that issue. This means, you’ll need to download the latest BIOS from the motherboard manufacturer’s website. There will be directions on how to do this included on their website. Otherwise, you’ll have to RMA or swap memory out with the retailer.