Before continuing with the event coverage a quick word on the present overclockers: the brand new Hardware.Info team consists out of three dutch overclockers: Nedernakker (Bauke Caspers), Oldscarface (Roger Kortenhoeven) and Rsnubje (Joost Verhelst) and one belgian waffle, myself Leeghoofd. All are Liquid Nitrogen purists and the shared knowledge should allow this team to compete with other big names in the HWBOT PRO CUP. This league is to overclocking what the Champions league is to UEFA, featuring some of the best overclockers they strive to beat world records by using the latest high tech hardware and extreme cooling methods. Divided in teams of maximum five members, the Pro OC teams get five different challenges per round of three months. At the end of the round, the team with the best results is declared winner.

Back to the event now, place to be was the Informatique Computer shop in Berkel Rodenrijs in the Netherlands.

Maurice from Informatique prepared our bench corner with direct access to the coffee machine, good move man!

The HWInfo Pro OC team got in early to prepare two setups for liquid nitrogen; special thing is that both were featuring LN2 cooled graphics cards in an SLI configuration.  This is one of the few occasions where a vendor allows to cool down their graphics cards, kudos MSI. What better card to use then then MSI's fab Lightning series.

First setup comprised of:

• Intel Haswell ES i7-4770K cooled by Der8auer Fusion Rev3.1 Pot
• MSI z87 MPOWER motherboard
• Crucial Ballistix DDR3 at 2400MHz or higher clocks
• Two MSI GTX 770 Lightning cards cooled by Kingp1n FAT pots
• Plextor M5 Pro Solid State Drive
• Enermax Revolution 85+ 1250W Power supply

The second setup:

• Intel Ivy Bridge-E i7-4930K cooled by Kingp1n F1 pot
• MSI x79 XPOWER II Big Bang motherboard
• G.SKill TridentX 16GB at 2400MHz
• Two MSI GTX 780 Lightning cards cooled by Kingp1n FAT pots
• Enermax and Antec Power supplies

Third setup:

• Intel Haswell i7-4770K cooled by a single stage phase change
• MSI z87 XPOWER motherboard
• Avexir Dual channel RAM kit
• MSI R290X Lightning Radeon card

The latter setup was to show off the potential of MSI's latest AMD Lightning offering and to allow the spectators to get a guide on how to overclock an MSI based setup. Guidance was given by MSI's in house overclocker T!no, assisted by mister Tapakah aka Semjon I drink LN2 for breakfast.

The first setup handled the strain very well during the numerous hours of torture. Rsnubje slowly increased the clocks of both the GTX 770 Lightning cards, The Intel ES i7-4770K processor was finally humming at 5900MHz, this with Hyper threading enabled. Since this is a public demo things were not pushed to the max as the setups had to be kept running during a whole afternoon. Nevertheless Rsnubje managed to set 6 new world records on his SLI powered setup. Congratz Joost, nice effort and good preparation, though pretty sure there is still some margin left :) Go nuts on the other benchmarks man!

New WRs set for the GTX 770 SLI were:

• 3DMARK03: 209288 marks
• 3DMARK05: 62553 marks
• 3DMARK06: 50490 marks
• Aquamark03: 477531 points
• 3DMARK Firestrike: 15055 marks
• 3DMARK Firestrike Extreme: 8222

The GTX770 Lightning clocks were ranging from stock to a whopping 1577MHz on the core and 1953Mhz on the memory.

Some of the WR screenshots:

The second setup suffered from many issues. Starting with erazor gum somehow ending up in the PCIe slot, to cold issues and finally condensation halted any further overclocking attempt on this rig. A typical overclockers nightmare, days of preparation and pretesting and on D-day it all goes wrong.

The single phased setup showed some great potential as the MSI 290X Lightning card was running great at +1300MHz clocks on the stock cooler during most 3D benchmarks. Clocks which usually take at least water cooling and even extremer cooling methods to achieve. Good looking card there T!no !!

Here are some more pictures of what happened during the event...

Some more action of Saturday, from LN2 monkeys to a VIP visit from Sam aka Tapakah the memory wizard.

MSI went along way with the Z87 boards, yes finally the XPOWER allows great memory clocking too. One of the main culprits when we reviewed the board at the Z87 launch. Well done MSI !

Sam with his new outfit and sponsored LN2 flask, sadly his friend rather remained anonymous.

Overclocking is a serious sport, though most of us can have fun no matter how well or bad it all went. Playing with LN2 is fun fun fun... though always remain careful please!

Bauke playing Gorilla in the Mist Part 2 and grumpy git Oldscarface hyper-focused on clocking the MSI 290X Lightning card.

A lot of people stopped by at the Informatique shop to see the Hardware.info Pro OC team in action playing with MSI's latest hardware. Even without any WRs set, this OC academy can be classified as a big success as the passion of overclocking was highlighted again on several forums, hardware sites and social media.

A big thanks to MSI, Intel, Informatique and Hardware.Info for hosting this event and of course all the people who helped during and those that attended the event !

From left to right: some unknown MSI PR guy, Martijn aka T!no, Oldscarface, Rsnubje, Leeghoofd, Koen from MSI and Nedernakker.

See you guys soon in April for some more overclocking fun! This was the MSI OC Academy 2014, leeghoofd logging off...