Introduction

All of you most certainly know the company ASUS, one of the leading companies when it comes to PC hardware. The company held the 2013 edition of the ASUS Open Overclocking Cup (AOOC), which debuted in 2012. The event brought some of the best overclockers from Europe, Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan together into 13 teams—all under one roof in Moscow. AOOC was held on the sidelines of the Igromir 2013 Gaming Exhibition, Russia's biggest expo to showcase the gaming industry and general gaming culture.

Each participating team not only has the honors, but will also be awarded two ASUS Maximus VI Extreme mainboards and two ASUS GTX 780 DirectCU II graphics cards. The top 3 teams will compete for a total of $6000 (1st: $3000, 2nd: $2000, 3rd: $1000) and will also be awarded an Intel Core i7-4770K and Corsair Vengeance Pro 2800 MHz memory kit.

The Finals

Riding on the success of the 2012 event, AOOC 2013 is bigger and better in scale. The 13 participating teams made the cut out of a pile of contestants who participated in qualifiers earlier this year in April, which essentially making this event the Finals.

ASUS kindly invited me to report on the event, and I welcomed this opportunity to see the best of the overclocking scene in action, and for a chance to visit Moscow, experiencing its unique and vibrant life.



ASUS held the final stage of AOOC at the Igromir Gaming Exhibition, which is the biggest gaming-related event in the whole region—it's not unlike E3 or GamesCom.


The event was hosted by Vlad of ASUS Russia, who many of you will know as "slamms." He is without doubt one of the best overclockers in the world. His extensive experience with overclocking provided him with the required insight to organize a flawless event, with fair rules that cater to everyone. For example, the scoring setup allows teams to make up for a bad CPU by focusing on 3D benchmarks, and the other way around. Time was also limited—quite limited. People could then show that they can also work under pressure and in public, with avid visitors of the show peeking over their shoulders and taking pictures.

Hardware Draw

First up, the teams were randomly selected, and their seating locations were chosen.


At the same time, the teams got to pick two CPUs from a big tray, to fairly distribute the processors which had been previously tested to be as similar as possible. You can also see SF3D in these photos. He was flown in as an independent judge to oversee the competition, ensuring no rules were violated.


Each team was provided with two sets of hardware. One set was shipped to them weeks ahead of the finals, which allowed them to test and prepare the hardware with insulation (against condensation resulting from sub-zero cooling) and voltmods, for example. The second set was provided on-site and served as a backup in case of issues. Still, you had to be careful not to break parts because switching to a backup would have meant spending an enormous amount of time modding and insulating the backups all over again, which is bad given the limited time. It still provides a fallback option to at least get some points instead of ending up with a big fat 0 in some of the tests.