Hey guys,
Thanks to Gigabyte we got the chance to invade Perth, Western Australia just before Christmas. Perth is the home town of Kayl 'eminem' Hosken and Jono 'The Fist' Fitzgerald. Perth is the most remote city in the world, so even for us Aussies it takes over 4 hours to get their on plane.
The plan was simple, crash Perth, take of Kayl's house and make a mess of 3DMARK Vantage and 11 with 5 Gigabyte GTX580's.
We setup the following platform:
Gigabyte X58A-UD9
5x Gigabyte GTX580
Corsair GTX2 2250 MHz
Intel 980x
1x Corsair AX1200
2x Corsair HX1000
Kingpin Tek9 4.0/5.0 mixed pots
Many PCS of energy drink
This event was a great experience for us as Team Australia doesn't get much opportunity to play with 4-way setups, so there is a big learning curve. We started by testing each card individually on air, then all of them in 4-way with the CPU on LN2.
After our air testing we ran them through the Kayl/pro mod shop and did all the cold bug, vgpu and vpll mods to the cards. Then we began prepping the cards for subzero. Before going 4-way though we tested out one card to see what we might expect. Not the best clocks but pushing 1200+ for Vantage.
We had some issues getting the 4-way setup going straight away, so to troubleshoot we started with one card, then added another, then another, then another. Before we knew it we had the 4-way up and going and it was working reasonably well. 1050 was not a problem and 1080 was passing when we got some condensation issues and had to shut down. By this time it was 6am in the morning and we all needed to go to sleep.
It took us 3 days to get to this point to actually run 4-way and by the time it was working nicely, we had to pack up and go home! Lots of good lessons learned here, I have run 2-way plenty of times but 4-way is a whole different story. It was a great opportunity and alot of fun, and we will feel much more confident at smashing 4-way next time we get together.
This culminated in a top score of, which is fairly sad, CPU speed wasn't up, memory wasn't up, this is just a run during our testing. But I will take 65K+ any day!
Unfortunately throughout most of the setup period I was sick in bed and only got out of bed for the actual 4-way run. This sickness culminated in an ambulance being called at the Perth airport and then spending 5 days in hospital. That is the result of spending 5 days with Uncle Fester I guess! You can see in the photos I look fairly out of it. Most of the other guys also got sick for a few days after the event.
Worth mentioning is that Uncle Fester couldn't find any pants so he decided to use a vendor flag as a "skirt" of kinds. Showing no shame Fester worse this skirt out to the shopping center! :O
Cheers to Kayl for hosting us at his house and taking us out to the Little Creatures brewery, that was great fun! Also thanks for the great home made spirits, hey dino "you'll like it!"
If you are so inclined here is a link to the whole 3h 30minutes of livestream when we were working the 4-way out.
We have a new phrase to add to the dictionary, it is "scatter benching"
To "scatter bench"
To run a series of competitive benchmarks on computer hardware as fast as possible with no care of efficiency, also known as "hwboint benching"
scatter benching taking place
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