Tones OC Academy IV

Tradeshow & OC events by leeghoofd @ 2012-05-06

On the 5th of May, Tones joined forces with ASUS again, and invited the Madshrimps crew to assist the fourth edition of Overclock Academy. This time no trip into the dark woods of Netherlands, but a return to the roots of the first two Academy editions. Keep it small, cozy and limit the amount of invites to a minimum. Thus maximizing the teaching process and maybe doubling the fun. This event had to be rapidly organized. Aim was to keep it as close as possible to the launch date of Intel's Ivy Bridge processors (29th of April). Time to head off to Heist on the Hill (free English translation of Heist op den Berg) for another day overclocking fun.

Setups

Normally the [M]crew would spend at least a day, before the event, with the setups. Sadly due to time constraints we couldn't live up to our normal standards. It was decided to leave a bit earlier on Saturday, so there was still some left to check the available hardware for proper operation. Luckily we did this, as we had big issues with two setups. Very reluctant to boot with ram clocks over 1866Mhz. One brand new motherboard even refused to work with dual channel rams. Straight RMA right out of the box, sigh. By quickly pretesting the CPU's, RAMS and GPU's, we, the teachers, had already obtained a pretty good idea of the possibilities of each hardware setup.

Our 10 pupils were winners from a contest held on Hardwareinfo.nl, 4Tech.be and two lucky winners from ASUS NL. Sadly two couldn't make it due to waking up too late, maybe it was more a lack of motivation. Not our loss , but theirs :p

Three big prizes were provided by the three main sponsors of this event. First price was an Intel i7 Ivy Bridge 3770K CPU. Second price, an ASUS ROG Maximus V Gene board and the third price was either a Corsair H80 cooling unit or a Corsair 90GB SSD.

The forenoon planning was to explain the most vital bios settings for CPU overclocking. The i5-3570K and 4 i7-3770K CPU's were cooled with air cooling, either via a Scythe Mugen 3 or by a Corsair H80, all in one cooling solution.

The Heat is On

Since Ivy Bridge overclocking is far from spectacular on air, we decided to allow each setup to go for some more beefier Liquid Nitrogen action in the afternoon. This was our planning too at the previous Benelux event, but since the LN2 was never delivered, it was mission impossible then.

Hardware used :

Intel i5-3570K and i7-3770K CPUs
ASUS Maximus IV and V Gene boards
Corsair Vengeance 8GB 1866C9 dual channel kits
ASUS GTX560ti videocards
Corsair CX500W PSUs
Scythe Mugen 3 air cooler or Corsair H80 kit
Intel 330 SSD with Windows7

It's hard to grasp in words how much difficulties some had to assemble the Mugen 3 air coolers. The Corsair Vengeance LP kits surprised us. Since they are only rated at 1866C9-10-9-27 and we got a few of them up and running at 2600C10-12-12-30 SuperPi 32M stable. Pretty impressive stuff for such cheap sticks.

Sadly the latest ASUS GPU Tweakit was very buggy with the older GTX560ti graphic cards. Back to the drawing board ASUS software developpers, only being able to adjust the fan speed, does not make it an overclocking tool. Adjusting the GPU and RAM clocks always resulted in default speeds. We were obliged to use MSI's Afterburner for the GPU overclocking part.

At noon, one of the most important persons at Tones aka Bert, offered us a healthy sandwich to recharge the drained batteries.

LN2 Preparation

Our little padawans quickly got the ropes of it and were pushing the Ivies to 4.8-5Ghz during the 3DMark11 Entry test. The humble GTX560Ti's were clocked up to 950-1020Mhz and the rams at 2400-2500Mhz. Pretty fast learners or has overclocking become that simple with all the available tools and hardware ?

While Luc aka Gamer ( our most aged Team captain by the way ) explained how to prep the hardware for extreme cold, PJ ( Massman ) filled up the dewars in the garage.

Four setups in total were prepared for LN2 galore. Some prefer to use erazor gum, vaseline, kitchen roll paper,... soem even bring chinese food cups with them to facilitate the LN2 pouring.

More Fun Pictures

Some more pictures of the action. Nice to see some new born overclockers getting over 6Ghz and pushing the envelope. Sadly we also had to show them the lesser interesting part of our favourite hobby: cold issues (00 LED), condensation, bad mounting, but hey that's all part of the game.

The Winners

Our participants had to guess the highest Entry Level 3DMark11 score set by any of the 4 air cooled setups. The three closest answers would get one of the previously mentioned sponsored prices. But first a group picture.

First prize winner : an Intel i7-3770K CPU. It was cold outside wasn't it Thomas ?

2nd price : ASUS Maximus V Gene board. 3rd price winner opted to pick the 90GB Corsair SSD.

And PJ still failed at his driving exam ! Sorry mum I wrecked the Ford ( again )

A big thanks to the Tones team. Cheers for organising these events and to keep up with Madshrimps overclock team. Rogier and Milan from ASUS Netherlands