GIGABYTE Announces the Z170 March OC Madness Competition

[btarunr]

GIGABYTE TECHNOLOGY Co. Ltd., a leading manufacturer of motherboards and graphics cards, today announced its next competition for the overclocking community with the GIGABYTE Z170 March OC Madness Competition, to be hosted this March on HWBOT.org.

Kicking off March 12th, the GIGABYTE Z170 March OC Madness Competition will challenge overclockers to push their motherboards and 6th Gen Intel processors to the limit, in a two category, three stage competition that's absolute madness. This competition is open to all skill levels, with Novice, Rookie, Enthusiast, Elite and Extreme category levels allowing anyone to participate.



There are a number of cash and hardware prizes up for grabs! The winner for each category will be awarded $500 USD. In addition, participants that submit a score in all stages of their respective categories are eligible to enter a lucky draw for one of three GA-Z170X-Gaming 3 motherboards as the grand prize.

Category 1: Enthusiast, Rookie and Novice Overclockers
Stage 1: XTU

• Submissions open March 12
• Submissions close on March 24
• CPU frequency must be set at 4.5GHz max

Stage 2: HWBOT x265 1080p

• Submissions open on March 24
• Submissions close on March 31
• No restrictions, such madness!

Stage 3: SPI 32M

• Submissions open March 31
• Submissions close on April 9
• CPU frequency must be set at 4GHz max

Category 2: Elite and Extreme Overclockers -
Stage 1: XTU

• Submissions open March 12
• Submissions close on March 24
• CPU frequency must be set at 5GHz max

Stage 2: Maxxmem Read Bandwidth

• Submissions open on March 24
• Submissions close on March 31
• No restrictions, such madness!

Stage 3: Geekbench Single Core

• Submissions open March 31
• Submissions close on April 9
• No restrictions, such madness!

Contest Rules

• This competition is limited to GIGABYTE Z170 motherboards only.
• Every submission must include the competition background and a picture of the rig.
• To be eligible for the lucky draw, participants must submit in all stages of one category.
• A participant is eligible to win only once. If a participant is a category winner, he will not be eligible for the lucky draw.
• In case of a tie, the tie-breaker is the best score in Stage 3. If there's still a tie, the best score in Stage 2, etc.

The GIGABYTE Z170-March OC Madness Competition will run from March 12th until April 9th 2016, 23:59 (UTC +8). Good luck to all!

For more information, visit this page.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[AsRock]

Sweet $500 for a chance of totally fucking a PC with a chance of getting a mobo replacement Priceless.

But i guess for those who are doing it anyways what the heck right.

 

[buildzoid]

Sweet $500 for a chance of totally fucking a PC with a chance of getting a mobo replacement Priceless.

But i guess for those who are doing it anyways what the heck right.

Dead hardware is rare even on LN2.

 

[MxPhenom 216]

I shall win with an over 9000GHZ OC Pentium 4.....

 

[Caring1]

I shall win with an over 9000GHZ OC Pentium 4.....

Good luck finding the socket 775 to socket 1151 adapter

 

[Jism]

Dead hardware is rare even on LN2.

Even on LN2 sessions hardware can 'degrade' real fast. Just depends on the voltage you are sending in your chips.

 

[MxPhenom 216]

Good luck finding the socket 775 to socket 1151 adapter

Or just build a seperate system.....

 

[RejZoR]

I never understood how these competitions even work. Someone has a hand picked ES chip that clocks like insane and wins to someone who bought it off shelf and which leaks like crazy and clocks like crap. It's 50% down to connections for hand picking the good chips, 25% OC skill and the remaining 25% is luck. Also, how does clock cap work in a competiton? The max 4GHz for example. 6700K already runs at that out of the box lol.

 

[Caring1]

I never understood how these competitions even work. ..... how does clock cap work in a competiton? The max 4GHz for example. 6700K already runs at that out of the box lol.

I was wondering the same, they did say it was madness.

 

[ShockG]

I never understood how these competitions even work. Someone has a hand picked ES chip that clocks like insane and wins to someone who bought it off shelf and which leaks like crazy and clocks like crap. It's 50% down to connections for hand picking the good chips, 25% OC skill and the remaining 25% is luck. Also, how does clock cap work in a competiton? The max 4GHz for example. 6700K already runs at that out of the box lol.

As someone who has been involved in XOC since 2003 and with the hwbot stats you can check for yourself regarding the point I'm making.
ES CPUs do not overclock better than retail CPUs. Gulftown was the exception and that was early in the CPUs life cycle. In fact many retail QE stepping CPUs are come off the same wafer as ES CPUs.
Record holding CPUs right now in most benchmarks are retail CPUs.

When you say 25% down to OC skill, I encourage you to read any one of TiN's threads from EVGA, look at old Shamino's scores and what he does in OC guides. Elmor at ASUS (formerly at MSI) is a brilliant overclocker, 8-Pack (who isn't benching ES, but works for an SI and bins hundreds of retail CPUs),
der8auer who made the Delid kit for Skylake - https://www.caseking.de/en/der8auer-delid-die-mate-fsd8-015.html - and works for an SI as well. Who is a fantastic mind in overclocking and insanely knowledgeable in overclocking/engineering isn't just this successful in his ranking because he is lucky or has no skill. I could name 50 more perhaps to invalidate the 25% skill claim you make.

4GHz cap works so that people tune memory timings and don't rely on the CPU clock.
Nothing prevents a higher NB clock, memory clock, tuning primary, secondary and tertiary timings as well. It's about tuning now about the lucky CPU. That's why the 4GHz clock limit.

Effectively, the entire post you made is unfounded and blatantly incorrect at every turn.

 

[RejZoR]

So, if CPU clock is limited, it's again down to how good chipset and RAM is, not the actual OC skill...

 

[LoonyBuck]

So, if CPU clock is limited, it's again down to how good chipset and RAM is, not the actual OC skill...

I can understand that most people would think that overclocking competition would be won by someone who have better hardware, and not skills. While I agree that 'silicon lottery' on CPU/GPU/RAM can sometimes make a difference between good and bad overclocks, it doesn't always win a competition, believe it or not.

Nowadays competitive overclocking differs a lot to 4-5 years ago. The difficulty of overclocking itself is going down(anyone with auto-OC button can do overclock ), but winning a competition takes a LOT more than having good hardware and knowing what slider to adjust.

Little details start to matter here, for example:
- Competitive overclockers usually have to search for certain combinations of OS and Driver for a particular benchmark(e.g 3DMark), not to mention having to find the right tweak on the driver as well. The amount of work and effort is enormous.
- It's not uncommon to see two or more 'pros' having the exact CPU+RAM setup, or even have the exact same system configuration. And yet there will be someone who search for better BIOS to maximize tuning capability of a certain RAM setup. You found a good BIOS on Hynix MFR, doesn't always mean that particular BIOS version will work the same on Samsung B-die setup.

In the end, the process and effort of squeezing out a particular setup to it's highest potential can make a difference between successful setup and what is not. At this level, sometimes we usually see that the limiting factor is no longer the hardware, but the overclocker.

As an addition, the more the 'difficulty' of the OC competition, the difference between a pro competitive overclockers and the casual ones start to appear.

For example: In aircooled,everyday scenario, there will be little to no difference how a pro overclocker tune a GTX 980 Ti compared to normal overclockers, they will be limited by the GPU capability quite easily!

But put them in Extreme OC scenarios, you can see that the Pros will have a lot more knowledge needed to push that GPU to its maximum ocability, from how to find the sweetspot temperature, what PSU is needed for the setup, how to mount the LN2 Pot properly, what level of loadline calibration is better for certain benchmark load, and even something trivial as choosing thermal paste will make a difference in the final GPU clockspeed achievable.

So tl;dr, in some scenarios, yes the silicon lottery happens even in overclocking competition, but sometimes it's not enough to win a competition

 

[RejZoR]

Also the Skylakes aren't particularly interesting to overclock until you sail into LN2/DICE territory if you ask me.

 

[LoonyBuck]

Also the Skylakes aren't particularly interesting to overclock until you sail into LN2/DICE territory if you ask me.

I'm with you on that, even with delidding and changing to better TIM, hitting 4.8Ghz+ stable is quite a challenge. If you managed to find a good mems to play, maybe there's some fun but the overclockability on ambient setup is a bit 'meh' considering the 4Ghz base.
Heck, I'd find fiddling with Kaveri APUs or even those Non-K overclocks more interesting

 

[Steven B]

I never understood how these competitions even work. Someone has a hand picked ES chip that clocks like insane and wins to someone who bought it off shelf and which leaks like crazy and clocks like crap. It's 50% down to connections for hand picking the good chips, 25% OC skill and the remaining 25% is luck. Also, how does clock cap work in a competiton? The max 4GHz for example. 6700K already runs at that out of the box lol.

The percentages are more like:
25% wits
25% experience
25% hard work
25% luck


In clock locked competition it removes a large portion of the "luck". What comes into play is memory and tweaks.

Memory has the most settings you can change, from trying every tertiary to tuning RTLs. They don't sell kits that run 4GHz DDR4 at CAS 12, you need to find the best kit you can, freeze it, and pump enough volts not to kill it while tuning the timings. Different boards also have different efficiency levels, so by requiring one brand motherboard, it also helps to even the playing field.

Next is tweaking, some benchmarks have very little tweaks (like CINEBENCH) and some have a lot of tweaks (like superpi). SuperPI is interesting because it's not only single threaded, but also heavily relies on memory timings. The tweaks are everything from wazza to registry tweaks, mostly in the OS. It then becomes a game of making sure you found all the optimizations for the computer to run at 4ghz on the CPU and take the least time to calculate 32million digits of pi.

 

[overclocking101]

i know ill be entering this comp. good luck to everyone

 

[jaggerwild]

I Feel lucky punk!