News Asus Open Overclocking Cup 2014 final coming this Saturday

I've never understood overclocking competitions. You need to run a piece of software to see who wins because the actual differences are imperceptible to humans? It's like twenty cars always crossing the finish line at the same time and always requiring a photo finish to see who won. Is that suppose to be fun?

 

You use software because the results are not immediately obvious like, say, a moving car... Not because the margins are so fine.

 

I would argue that the margins are so fine that they are imperceptible to human senses. Let's race bacteria. Did you bring your microscope?

 

It amazes me how far overclocking has come. I still remember cutting fins into a small off-cut of aluminium to stick on a Voodoo 4MB in the days before aftermarket coolers and what have you.

 

I'm sure they will say it is fun evidenced by their laughing their asses off all the way to the bank.

 

I am so up for this.

 

I recall being a HWBOT #1 overclocker, it was a short lived experience (1day iirc) so to make it to #1 and remain there is quite the achievement, kudos to 8-Pack.

For me, the fun used to come from clocking the hardware to it's highest MHz setting and thrashing it, nowadays (and I assume it's the same as it was a few years back) - people still go for highest stable MHz using liquid nitrogen and electronic 'know-how' to allow additional voltage modifications which allow more voltage to be applied to certain parts of the board and also to stabilise any ripples in voltage supply.

I sometimes worry about the Lance Armstrong effect - all the software (including the OS) is 'tweaked' to a point where you could not use it for anything else other than benchmarking - example: When 3d mark is being run you don't even recognise the benchmark (in some cases the screen remains blank), because all the eye candy is stripped out.....In one version of PCMark, you could get a higher score on a certain test by wiggling the mouse around????

For me, it's too detached from the real world to relate to anything outside of it's own 'bubble'.

You can (and people do) put all that aside and go for personal bests, it's an expensive game for sure and to rank globally you need to be (or used to) able to bench older hardware on newer platforms (GTX7950 on a core i7 for example).....and again finding the right 'clockable sample is a lottery.

Ultimately, you have to be 'lucky' with your GPU/CPU/RAM, it's not just a case of buying something and the playing field is even (although in the real world the differences are minute in the land over extreme overclocking, small differences are everything).

People spend big and stress test each product until they find the sample and unless you're sponsored (and some are) it could be seen as just throwing good money after bad to support your habit.

So you could be the best at what you do, but if someone's hardware is a better sample than yours, then you are going to lose and that could be the case at this competition.

All that being said, to our UK representatives, I wish them the very best of luck in their quest to be the AOCC champions.

 

Lots of what we do for enjoyment could be seen as 'pointless' by others.
One man's meat and all that.