Tones Overclock Academy III - Benelux Edition

Tradeshow & OC events by petervandamned @ 2011-08-19

Sunday 14th August 2011. Exactly one year after Tones Overclock Academy I, the Academy goes international. Place of action, the beautifull pitoresk city of Utrecht. It was just 2 months ago we had Gigabyte launching their X58-OC board at TOA II. For the first edition Asus was our hardware provider. This time, MSI is the guest manufactor for motherboards and videocards. Consistent sponsors are Intel for the CPUs and Corsair for memory and PSU's. Due to the international character we initially had plans for up to 20 teachers and 80 students. Before we were limited to the madshrimps crew for the teaching part. But together with volunteers from Overclock Team holland we had the opportunity to invite a lot more students.

Introduction

Before we step into the TOA III, we must applaud the efforts by the two initial organisors. Drucchi and Blue-Tiger. Together with Emanuel from Tones they managed to get all the sponsors on board. Providing all the required gear for another fun overclocking Academy. Thank you Corsair, MSI and Intel for participating.

Location: Middle of the Netherlands: Utrecht Oudengracht 252. A party place called Trianon 14 august 2011

As you can see the Trianon, has quite some character, being used in the weekend mainly by dancing schools. Curious what happens there if not being crowded by some mad overclockers.

Adding a bit of hardware

10 Z68-GD65 G3

10 X58 Big Bang X-Power

Intel 990/970/960 and 10 x 2600K's

Corsair memory ( Dominator, GT and Vengeance ram kits ) and Corsair 650 HX PSU's

20 x GTX580 Lightning

5 x GTX560 HAWK

Quite a drooling picture for a hardware g33k picture. This one went global, as especially them 20 MSI Lightning cards are very wanted amongst overclockers. Quite impressive the guys from Tones got such a big stock together.

We initially had plans for 20 teachers, hence the 20 setups, and 80 students. Though having already done a few events before myself and PJ were a bit sceptical having 4 students and one teacher per setup. Three was already a crowd, 5 could be too much. Due to the fact that the final tweaks were running late, the insciptions were only live , 10 days before the event. So not everyone could make it or get back from vacation in due time. Next time better luck lads. Even though some complained of the long trip and early wake up call. We had to get up around 0330-0400 to get there on time. Kuddos to everyone that was already there at 0700 AM to help setting up the systems.

Next step a word from the sponsors

Manu from Tones, a natural born speecher, talking about the concept of the day, some rules (plz don't break stuff :p) , the time schedules and wait even some nice prices :)

1st Price : A full INTEL system : case, motherboard, 2600k and SSD. Only add a PSU and GPU

2nd Price : MSI videocard 6950 Twin Frozr II edition

3rd Price : CORSAIR Dominator GT memory dual channel kit

Before we start a group picture is needed :

Teachers showing how to get max out of the systems

Depending if the student had the specific request they could either be introduced in overclocking on one setup. But why limit yourself ? So most went for the double load and tortured the Z68 and X58 set-ups. Up to the teachers to try to explain the in and outs of overclocking that particular setup. But pictures show more then a 1000 words!

Two of the most elderly Shrimps, Peter (petervandamned) and Luc (Gamer). One with too much a hair and the other one without. But both pretty big fun and entertaining and loads of wisdom to share.

Pieter-Jan (Massman) and Albrecht (Leeghoofd) monitoring stuff. Quite fun battle amongst the (ex) Tones guys at certain moments.

On the right Neil (ModAap ) took the youngest overclocker under his wings and his little paddawan was a very quick learner, maxing out his hardware at an insane rate.

After a few hours with some minor errors (powercuts lol), most got the hang off it and they could start pushing their systems.

In the tradition of the OC Academy Tones started a little challenge. Two 3Dmark Vantage Entry scores were announced on the two different sockets. This score was used a reference and the participants had to guess how high the best scoring S1155 or S1366 score would be.

3dmark Vantage entry scores had to be made. Why not the performance benchmark ? (as used at Hwbot) To not give an unfair advantage to the poeple that surf the Bot daily.

FYI all systems had pretested MSI GTX580 Lightning cards (for database purposes), but noone knew what card they had running.

Wow if we only could believe these 2600k overclocks! (yes Peter you f*cked *p, leaving EIST and co on :p)

Resulting in the color of the day

BSOD and for the smallest among us we didn't mind much, they played card games on oc-ed systems. Feeling the tremendous calculating power generated lol.

And some people in deep deep thoughts. Mister Dennis Achterberg from MSI kept a close eye on us and immediately helped with some beta biosses (thanks for that man !) and reported discovered issues directly to his staf. The boards used were the first shipment. And as usual there are some minor hickups that need a fix asap.

As always it never goes as planned. Leeghoofd in major condensation pain lol.

Time for some demonstrations on LN2 and extra special hardware (ab)use.

For those wanna be LN2 users in the future and specials

By mister gamer himself, a lession in insulating the hardware. And this time he didn't kill the setup :)

Let's hope we will see a few new LN2 users in the future. Benching is more fun in the subzero region :)

Time for something special :

4 way sli is doable with the MSI GTX580 Twin Frozr III cards, some competing vendor claimed a 4 way setup would never be possible. Time to set the record straight.

Ofcourse this couldn't be done on an MSI board, so we got some help by something called an expander.

Jort repaired my Vapochill, unit kept the 960 at 4.5Ghz during almost 8 hours. If you need some unit to be fixed, revised, refilled give him a pm.

Master PJ at work and finals

Master PJ Massman was a bit forced by MSI's guy Dennis. Putting pressure on him to "break records". There was even a sabotaged run. Another MSI employee pulled the power cable, accidentally or not ? This persons wanted to remain unknown. So we will just call him Niels from now on.

Manufacturer: MSI
Model: Big Bang XPower
Cooling: Standard Stock Cooling
Chipset: X58

Model: Core i7 Extreme 990X (Gulftown)
Cooling: Liquid Nitrogen
Temperature (°C): -130.0 (load) -130.0 (idle) 25.0 (ambient)
Batch: L101Bxxx
Speed: 3.470 @ 6.000MHz

Model: 3x MSI GeForce GTX 580 (GF110)
Cooling: Standard Stock Cooling
Product: Lightning
Clockspeed: 777/1.002 (stock) @ 925/1.200 MHz

Product: Dominator GT
Cooling: Standard Stock Cooling
Type: 6144MB DDR3 SDRAM
Clockspeed: @ 800MHz
Timings: CL9-9-9-27

3DMark Vantage - Performance ranking

62919 marks with 3x GTX580 @ 925/1200MHz

On hwbot place 1 by using 3 cards on standard cooling.

Job well done !!!

Time for the prices :

By taking a gues on the highscores of the day. As mentioned before the students used 10 x58 systems and 10 Z68 systems. All predicted scores were nicely kept by the charming wife of Manu in a excel sheet on her little netbook.

Not by the highest score of the day, but the one at 16.00 or 4.00 PM.

for the Z68 and x58

Lucky number 1 was Ferdinand Aequitis winner of the MSI R6950 Twin Frozr II and Dennis that smile looks much better!

And the winner's name of the Corsair memory kit was Gregory Broothaerts , sorry bro but we have no further info about you. Well also one lucky guy, in red Jeroen from Corsair.

At the end of the day a real unexpected finish. Each one that wanted to participate in a lucky raffle, was attributed a nr in the netbook of Manu's misses.

Manu from Tones told us Intel had sponsord a intel system.

Just by random choice made by the barlady

Sorry for the outfocussed picture (edit : shaky hands Peter ?)

His name is nedernakker. Winning a nice setup today and a future dad every minute now. Cellhone within reach he didn't even knew if he could stay till the end.

Being one of the teachers and a real master of overclocking. You lucky ......