HWBot Professional Overclockers Cup: R1 2014

In most technical hobbies, such as cars, audio, visual, or even non-technical, such as hiking or reading, there are a level of extreme enthusiasts that go above and beyond what is normally rational. Sometimes they use tools for limited times rather than 24/7 use, or push the performance of those tools to the extreme limits. In terms of computing, this is known as overclocking – being able to push the components beyond their specified limits to get more performance. There are two levels of overclocking:

– Stable, 24/7: For use in the home.
– Almost stable for 10 minutes: For use in competitions to get the best score.

This last point is where competitive overclocking comes in – people who participate in competitive overclocking are aiming to get a better score than anyone else by benchmarking their hardware. This means pushing the limits, getting better hardware, getting better cooling, to the point where liquid nitrogen is being used to cool the system for the 10-15 minutes required to get that score. Even more extreme, the hardware can be modified down to the electronic level to push the scores higher.

In order to compete against each other, these extreme overclockers join a league. The biggest and top league for this is hosted at HWBot.org, in their Professional Overclockers Cup. In this cup, teams of up to five overclockers join together, and in each round (that lasts 10-12 weeks) try to outperform each other in a series of benchmarks – some processor based, some gaming based, all of which require intricate knowledge and skill in order to be #1.

This post is to point towards the first Pro OC round in 2014. Yours truly is competing in the team 5XP, however currently at #1 is the UK team of 8-Pack and HiVizMan, dubbed OCUKPro. This team finished #1 in the final round of 2013, and 8Pack currently sits at #1 in the world. In fact, during R1 2014, this happened:

Putting UK at #1,#2 and #3 🙂