ASUS ROG OC Showdown at Dreamhack Winter 2009
 

ASUS will hold the world’s first overclocking competition where skill is the only factor on the 27 and 28 of November: The ASUS ROG OC Showdown. The competition takes place live at the ASUS booth in Sweden, during Dreamhack Winter 2009. The true unique characteristic of this competition is that the structure of the competition removes the element of variables such as a difference in quality of the CPU and GPU. The aim is to create an overclocking competition format that is truly viable as a sport, rather than a product exhibition.

Source: http://hwbot.org/article/news/asus_r...ck_winter_2009

2 setups... how is that the same quality hardware ?
Pure skills ?

Well, the only way to do that is 1 setup for all the participants, but that would more than likely make it a multi-day event.
Full mods and etc allowed, each person gets lets say 12 hours of continuous work with the setup.

because after 45min you switch, so you both use the same setups for same amount of time :)

how much time do ppl have to show their "skill"?

what about software? Thats a huge part of background prep to any serious OCer........can you take your own?

how is 3dmark P a measurement of skill? what kind of skill are you talking about?

45 minutes
oh dear

Some time ago on a local forum, after an oc contest in which luck decided
instead of skill, we also thought of this method. But during the discussion,
the weak spot also came up: if team 1 use such high settings (vcore, etc)
that damage the system, team 2 may have a hard time using setup 1...

45mins? That's way too short

Also
:ROTF: Oh the self-irony...

Sorry for again poking fun at the contest's main sponsor, but this also
warrants a laugh or two. Post codes? Post leds. Hw status readouts? Bios
and DMMs. Like a race car? Yeah, but a race car is a race car and not a
computer. With a computer you don't need another computer to see the
bios. Give me some of the stuff the marketing guys are smoking, please :D

TBH, the most interesting part of this competition is the tournament structure (knock-out system). See attachement

and why are those people chosen?

- [Belgium] Massman
- [Italy] Gorgioprimo
- [Greece] Hipro5
- [Sweden] Elmor
- [Finland] SF3D
- [Finland] Sampsa
- [Germany] Stummerwinter
- [Sweden] ME4ME

Everybody except ME4ME was chosen by ASUS, as far as I know, by invitation. ME4ME "qualified" via Sweclockers, who collected people's overclocking "resumés". I obviously didn't submit my signature here. :D

sounds interesting! reminds me of the first AOCM, german oc championship a few years ago...
there were 2 identical systems with similar clocking hw and people had xx minutes to get the highest spi scores out of it.

people should get the chance to have several runs imo, that removes luck/bad luck, and makes it more agressive, as people dont have to be over cautious about crashing the system. having several attempts of xx minutes would be perfect, maybe 3 attempts for each benchmark, that would be great... and let people chose what benchmark they want to try first, so somebody will try spi first, somebody will go for 3dmark first... that way there will be different strategies which will make it very interesting!

i hope asus will set up a live stream!

The system will be running 45 min. There will be a period of time (atm 30min) dedicated for preparations for each person and system; CPU pot mount and post+win boot/driver check (not allowed to change any settings or start Vantage). This information didnt make it in to the press release but will be in the competition information kit and rules.

Also something that needs to be added is that no match will use the same two cpus or graphics cards as the match before. Each match will start with two fresh cpus and four fresh 5870.

You could say this is a trial and error competition in the hunt for a format that is interesting for people to watch live (even for people outside of forums like XS). That is also why there are so few people invited for the competition (that it is the first time we try this).

Definitely, looks to be more interesting to watch from spectator point of view.

mmmhhh idk... thatll end up with people being super cautious though... im not sure if this is the best approach, but it definately sounds a lot more interesting than the usual hw parade oc events we had lately :toast:

on first AOCM the systems were pretested to run within the same clock range (I think max. difference was 20MHZ) but the new idea of switching systems in the upcoming event sounds very intersting. But it sounds like this kind of competetion takes a large amount of time when every team needs to prepare each system. Also hoping for a live stream, that would be fantastic!
Let's see how it comes out and good luck to all :up:

Wasnt Gigabyte the first to have a contest where skill was the only factor? The CPU speed was limited to 4GHz.

I've not fully read and absorbed all thed etails but all contests are good contests :D

I like the idea of ROG Connect. I started looking at a way of implementing a netbook-controlled LN2 setup....maybe this could be the first step towards that? :D:D

Good luck to all the participants, I'll be watching this keenly. :cool:

I think massman wil slaughter them all :D

sounds interesting, Kinc can we check how someone from OCTV to be there to make live broadcast + video ?

good luck everyone ;)

Marcus why do you only say only CPU pots...are you saying GPUs are not going on LN2 :confused:

If you somehow get a computer with everything I think i can help you with that.

Afaik no.

this looks interesting, will they be streaming live footage over the tubes?

Definitely some issues there with things like software and time constraints, but I'm not sure there is a lot you can do for it. If people didn't rotate a bit it would be largely luck of the draw in terms of whether you get a CPU/GPU/etc that happens to be able to clock better than anyone else's. As for the software you do have to take the ability to cheat into account, and as it's a hardware competition I think that's fair.

Congrats to everyone chosen to enter, and good luck!

"Only skill" competition can't really exist :)

For example, limiting only to 4Ghz does not show everything. Maybe you can tweak good but have no idea how to keep sub -100C temps stable etc. etc.