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.

I call it the “93X” because of what’s inside. This is built upon Zotac’s newest little 9300 ITX WiFi Motherboard. It offers all the features needed to play the latest game titles which include:

1. Intel LGA 775 Desktop Processor Support
2. 2 x DDR2 DIMM Memory Slots (Max 4GB Memory)
3. PCI-Express x16 Graphics Slot
4. Integrated HD Audio
5. Full USB 2.0 Support
6. Integrated Wi-Fi

The resolution of your video games really depends on the grpahics card installed. Assuming you pick an ITX chassis large enough with an equally capable power supply, you can pretty much play any game title available. This particular chassis offered the following specs:

1. Intel Q9550 Core 2 Quad Processor
2. Zotac 9300 ITX Wi-Fi Motherboard
3. 2 x 2GB Patriot Viper Memory
4. Zotac 9800 GT 512MB Synergy Video Card
5. FSP Group 300 Watt ITX Power Supply

It played Mirror’s Edge without any issues what so ever at 1680 x 1050 and 1900 x 1200 resolutions. As far as I’m concerned, this is the official new, compact, portable level of gaming. It’s the most powerful ITX gaming system seen to date.

All it needs is an LED fan, maybe some sweet Crucial Ballistix Tracer DDR2 memory, or mini-CCFL to show off the window. And you can build this one for as little as $400 if you down size to a Core 2 Duo rather than Quad.