GO OC 09 Coverage

[Rob Williams]

Hi all:

I'm in City of Industry for the final "Semi-Finals" of Gigabyte's global overclocking competition, GO OC 09. At the first GO OC, which occurred last fall, the company held only one event, but in 2009, they decided to take things global. As a result, there were semi-finals held all over the world. The one here is for North American overclockers only, ten from the US and one from Canada.

The final is held alongside Computex this year, where the winners from each semi-final will go head-to-head for the overall prize.

The tools of choice are 3DMark 06 and Super Pi, and whoever can hit the best scores by the end of the day, with their given equipment and hardware, will go on to the final in Taipei. The event here lasts only one day (Saturday), with some freestyle competition going on Sunday morning.

During the event, I'll visit this thread and make updates where possible, including with the overclocking results and also some photos.

 

[Kougar]

Best of luck, Rob! Wish I was there

The guys over at Madshrimps won their regional semi-final and some nice prizes to boot. Gigabyte is really putting it on with this event!

 

[Rob Williams]

Oh, I'm not participating. I suck at overclocking, and a fact to support this is that the board they're using for the competition is the same one I reviewed a few weeks ago that I managed to only get a 190MHz BCLK out of ;-) I agree though... Gigabyte is really going the extra mile with this event. They obviously see massive potential in the overclocking lifestyle.

Here are a few "pre-show" photos.

 

[Ben]

Wow, looks fun! What city is this in?

 

[Rob Williams]

Wow, looks fun! What city is this in?

It's in the City of Industry, which is around LA county. Here are some initial photos:

 

[Rob Williams]

Some more, including a Core i5-based motherboard (this is not a real model, but just a prototype):

 

[Rob Williams]

Some more updates... Super Pi 8M benchmarking going on now (lowest score so far is around 32.5s).

 

[Kougar]

What exactly is that black slot by the memory? That isn't actually a SODIMM slot is it??

LMAO, 16 phrases on the power system... That board must be their flagship Core i5 offering, going to be north of $200 too.

 

[Rob Williams]

That is indeed a SODIMM slot, and it's not the first I've seen on a desktop board, but I have no idea what purpose it's supposed to serve. It could be just a showing of what can be done, and maybe the SODIMM slot would be used as a supplement to onboard GPU memory or something. Either way, this is definitely a prototype, and we'll probably see more refined (and realistic) boards at Computex.

 

[Kougar]

Hey Rob. I've since found out what it was for, this was not the only Core i5 board to have it.

Apparently it was designed to be part of Intel's next Turbo Memory solution. From what I am hearing the project has been axed, which sounds like a good thing. Some info on it in the third paragraph Link

 

[Rob Williams]

Good find, and I agree, that's one thing we shouldn't have to worry about. Rather than a SODIMM slot, boards should just have 2GB of super-fast flash memory or something. It's cheap enough nowadays.

 

[Kougar]

I'd rather not even have that to be honest, what good is it when system RAM is reaching ungodly sizes now in new desktops? Every board I've seen pipes the flash memory into the USB bus as an always on solution... not only does this eat power regardless of if its being actively used or sitting idle but it'll be just one more thing sapping the USB bus. The more things running on the USB bus the slower it's going to get. I'd rather have $5 off the motherboard cost! And you know they'd never use the good super-fast stuff anyway...

 

[Rob Williams]

Good point. Plus, it's just another thing to go bad at some point down the road, and if it does, it would probably render the board useless (unless protections were installed).

 

[Kougar]

And to continue, I overlooked that the USB bus is limited ot 35MB/s... so really fast memory wouldn't help anything.

I can't even see the need for 6GB of RAM even though I use Windows 7 64bit and have tons of stuff running on a mere 4GB, yet I'm amazed at how many enthusiasts are plunking down the dough for 12GB kits. NH just ran an article I saw yesterday claiming Geil just launched 22 variations of 12GB kits to meet the demand...

 

[Rob Williams]

I missed the part about it sucking bandwidth from the USB bus. Things might change in USB 3.0 though... the total bandwidth should be much, much higher. Although, I still wouldn't care to have some generic flash chip on the motherboard. We have so much RAM nowadays, Intel should just use it instead.

I'm not sure what NH is, but 22 variations of a 12GB kit? That's insane! I'd like to see a typical enthusiast require that much RAM.

 

[Kougar]

I'm not sure what NH is, but 22 variations of a 12GB kit? That's insane! I'd like to see a typical enthusiast require that much RAM.

Nordic Hardware, one of the news sites I monitor. Here's the specific article with all 22 kits. http://www.nordichardware.com/index.php?news=1&action=more&id=9207


I will correct myself on one thing... I found a program that requires more than 6GB of RAM... LinX. It's like IntelBurn except it's in a nicer package with quicker settings and it actually works (will spawn 8 threads) on Core i7.

 

[Rob Williams]

Last time I tested LinX, it didn't touch more than four threads, so I'll definitely be testing out the latest version soon. Thanks for the heads-up.

 

[Kougar]

From what I read LinX updated the core in January, so that a single instance was capable of spawning 8 Linpack threads. IntelBurn does NOT spawn more than four threads, but LinX will. I can guarantee it because I've been using it.

Of course Intel recommends turning off Hyperthreading for Linpack use, but I want to stability check with HT on so this is the only way other than Prime95 to do it.