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The Great Texas Overclocking Competition

 by Wesley Fink on March 9, 2005 12:00 PM EST
31 Comments | Add A Comment
31 Comments

When ATI first showed their new AMD Athlon 64 chipset, we were mightily impressed with the overclocking capabilities of their new Bullhead board. As you saw in our Bullhead launch review, the new ATI chipset came out of the gate with some serious performance and overclocking capabilities. ATI Engineering has continued to work on Bullhead, finally attracting a few serious players to produce motherboards based on Bullhead. To get the word out to the enthusiast community, ATI decided to be a very visible sponsor of an Overclocking competition at Texas Gaming Festival 2005 in Dallas, Texas.

So, how do you get the attention of 500 dedicated LAN gamers and the Press?

You bring in the most extreme overclockers in the world - the ones that top the orbs at Futuremark on a regular basis. The equipment that they brought along was a show all on its own.

You make sure that these extreme overclockers have all the liquid nitrogen that they need to keep their equipment cranking out the benchmark records.

For the press, you do a "technology launch" of a new 512MB version of your top video card.

Fugger, Macci and OPPainter Go for the Orb
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  • ceefka - Tuesday, March 15, 2005 - link

    Hardly any of these guys has a case (?) They won't have Lian Li or Chieftec sponsoring this event anytime soon :-)

    #27 I liked AMD's fishtank. Though you're right about working in there. You can only guess what kind of goo goes in there. LOL.

  • Jeff7181 - Sunday, March 13, 2005 - link

    So does overclocking count as a sport now? LOL

  • stephenbrooks - Sunday, March 13, 2005 - link

    I wonder how many Athlon FXs and video cards they were allowed each? 1. Performance ceiling probably varies from chip to chip and 2. I guess if something went wrong they could burn a few up!

  • SDA - Friday, March 11, 2005 - link

    #25, no, but then it's not as if any hardware enthusiast in their right mind would trip into Best Buy for most of their computer needs as it is. All you really need to know is how to put tube A in socket B and so on.. the amount of skill involved in setting up a completely custom cooling system still isn't all that high. I'm not saying that anyone who can use a keyboard can do it, just that it's easy enough that being among the world's best overclockers probably doesn't require all that much skill. Kind of like being among the world's best soda can stove makers.

    Like I said: no real objection to this kind of thing at all, and no offense meant to the people who took part in this, but overclocking just doesn't seem like something you could really have a competition with.

  • ThanosOfTitan - Friday, March 11, 2005 - link

    The thing that piqued my curiosity the most was the mineral oil fish tank computer AMD was showcasing. I'd hate to have to work on that thing after it was submersed in oil.

  • ThanosOfTitan - Friday, March 11, 2005 - link

  • MadAd - Thursday, March 10, 2005 - link

    but these guys have to develop, build and test their own cooling system- i mean its not as if you can trip into best buy and walk out with the necessary freezer accessories preassembled in a rack like mr OPP has there.

  • SDA - Thursday, March 10, 2005 - link

    #21: Sorry, but I thought that cooling system would also go under "parts choice" (as in, choosing what parts of the system to buy; cooling is a vital part, no?).. my fault for not being clear enough.

  • JoKeRr - Thursday, March 10, 2005 - link

    and the worst part is when your new 1000 dollar processor (or what ever it is )dies..

  • JoKeRr - Thursday, March 10, 2005 - link

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