Overclocking, friends, Russia and fun. These are the 4 words that came to my mind when I first heard about the final event of the AOOC 2013. Additions could be : ‘Lack of sleep’, crazy timing, gaming show and live broadcast experience.
Intro
For the second year in a row, ASUS Russia organized the AOOC : ASUS Open Overclocking Cup.
The 2013 season was quite interesting on the qualification and the final event. While the 2012 season was only for Russia and some close country like Ukraine or Kazakhstan, the 2013 season was open to a wider range of competitors from all Europe. The qualification process was managed on Hwbot.org, allowing everyone to gather details on the forum and submit the benchmarks results on the site.
More on the qualification process can be found over here on HWBOT
Early-summer (may) the qualification process was over, and it was time to get more details about the final event itself, the final will be held in Moscow, Russia and will feature 13 teams of overclockers.
The ASUS AOOC 2013 Finals
The AOOC 2013 Final event took place on the 5th of October, at one of the biggest gaming event hosted at the Crocus Expo in Moscow. With more than 130,000 people attending the events (over 30,000 per day for four days!), and the decent size of the ASUS booth, the overclocking show was about to be one of the eye-catching stop for most people.
The OverClocking-TV team arrive like all the overclockers on the 4th and we discover the ‘driving’ skills of Russian people. Check-in at the hotel, meeting the overclockers around some drink, and then just a few hours of arranging the gears we brought with us to provide a great live broadcast experience, it was about time for dinner and a good but short night of sleep.
The overclockers arrived at the event location the before the doors open to the public, Slamms (Vlad) that organized the whole season of qualification and details for the finals, gave a few more details about the rules to the teams and lucky draw the teams to provide the hardware.
Each team got a set for the competition at the end of the qualification process, so every team had an ASUS Maximus VI Extreme motherboard, as well as an ASUS GTX 780 DirectCU II to pre-test before the event.
At the event location, every team got a backup mainboard as well as a backup graphic card and all the other gears necessary for the competition. Beside the Intel CPU, CORSAIR provided all the necessary components for the competition rigs. It looked like this: Some special memory kit based on one-side MFR, AX1200i PSU for 1200W of power, Neutron SSDs as well as keyboard and mouse.
The complete system was composed of :
- Motherboard: ASUS Maximus VI Extreme
- Processor: Intel Corei7 4770k
- Graphics: ASUS GTX780 Direct CU II OC
- Memory: Corsair Vengeance Pro CMY8GX3M2B2800C12R
- Storage: Corsair Neutron 128 Gb
- Power Supply: Corsair AX1200i
Additional details on the ASUS AOOC 2013
The competitions ranking system : http://www.overclocking-tv.com/content/events/18804/aooc-asus-open-overclocking-cup-2013/
The round 1 : http://www.overclocking-tv.com/content/events/18989/aooc-stage-1-report-2d-benching/
3D Benching : http://www.overclocking-tv.com/content/events/18997/aooc-2013-stage-2-3-report-3d-benching/
Final result : Stress and decision
The countdown was over and people were still handing over the last few bits of screenshot and scores to the judges. For the next 30 minutes the scoreboard went from having 4 teams ex-aequo for the first place to a very tight overall score points for the top 6 in less than 5 points differences… but something changed everything.
30 minutes after the end of the competition, judges verified all the screenshots to see if the rules were being respected. At this moment, Team Russia, Team Ukraine, team Germany, team Europe and Team France were so close that discussions started on : What happen is there are 2 teams with the same amount of points. That choice would define directly who is the winner and who will get the 1st runner-up place.
A first stage score adjustement made a complete difference in the final outcome.
The SuperPi on stage 1 was following a strict rule : In order to give everyone a chance, the frequency limitation was 5.5Ghz, to be precise : 5500.5Mhz, team Russia submitted a score with 5501Mhz… Yes that is only 0.5Mhz more but that was breaking the rule… This score adjustment made Team Russia rely on an earlier score, losing 2 place (and 5 points) in the SuperPi ranking granting Ukraine 3 more point on the general ranking, that made the complete difference between : having team Europe and France fighting for first spot, and Germany and Ukraine fighting for third spot… to a clear winner.
The first spot issue was solved even before it was really being dealt with, what remain was Team France and Team Europe had the same amount of point and the judges looked at the way the ranking system is and decided to pick 3DMark Firestrike as the ‘reference’ benchmarks.
In clear that solve the issue when 2 teams have the same amount of point, the team with the biggest 3DMark Firestrike Extreme score will get the advantage.
Team France had a higher result in Stage 3 than Team Europe, that defined the winning of the second place while team Europe got the third place.
ASUS AOOC 2013 Official Aftermovie
Final words
Final words? Overall that event was a true overclockers event. Rules were made by overclockers, slamms managed to get everything under control while this event was really intense. We managed to get the best internet connection we ever had for a live broadcast, allowing us to stream multiple cameras and give live info in English and Russian when slamms had a few minutes to spare.
We would like to thanks once again Vlad for his impressive work, his team and everyone that participated in making this event happen.
All the competitors, either used to this kind of event or the new comers turned out to perform in a very respectable way. Congrats guys !
Don’t let the excitement go down… Keep pushing it !
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