Overdrive: U.S. Team IRONMODS Wins!
After 16 hours of intense overclocking over two days, we have a world champion. Team IRONMODS from the United States - Jeremiah Allen, Jake Crimmins and Ton Khowdee, achieved the best scores during our Overdrive event, overclocking Core i7 Extreme 965 systems on X58 Eclipse motherboards by MSI. The race was long, but it also was almost neck and neck, as the scores kept improving almost every minute.
The Taiwan team CBB had a head start, as they quickly posted scores during the event. France started a bit late, with one team member being delayed on day one. Italy and Germany were always very active and the US team took some time to get up to speed. But their efforts were worth it: they were fastest in two 3DMark benchmarks, they dominated in wPrime 1024M and 32M. These four wins, combined with good scores on the other benchmarks, assured IRONMODS win.
Italy was close behind, with two wins in SuperPI 1M and 3DMark 05. Germany reached third place, with the strategy being to not fall too far behind the others in any benchmark. France was fourth and Taiwan fifth, as they had issues running the Core i7 in triple channel memory mode.
Final results:
| Benchmark | USA | Taiwan | Germany | France | Italy |
| SuperPi 1.5 1M | 8,078 | 8,157 | 8,093 | 7,987 | 7,985 |
| SuperPi 1.5 32M | 7 min 49,969 s | 7 min 52,516 s | 7 min 40,953 s | 7 min 24,990 s | 7 min 40.984 s |
| wPrime 1.55 32M | 5,188 | 5,422 | 5,219 | 5,756 | 5,297 |
| wPrime 1.55 1024M | 160,937 | 170,375 | 165,872 | 186,982 | 165,11 |
| PiFast 4.1 | 17,56 | 17,86 | 17,44 | 17,29 | 17,36 |
| AquaMark 2003 | 253814 | 251703 | 319212 | 238929 | 233043 |
| 3DMark 01 | 71010 | 71591 | 72764 | 71545 | 71821 |
| 3DMark 03 | 79794 | 75002 | 76105 | 69865 | 76188 |
| 3DMark 05 | 36762 | 35893 | 36586 | 35733 | 37070 |
| 3DMark 06 | 26733 | 25483 | 24194 | 22318 | 25143 |
As you can see, all the teams except Taiwan, which had those pesky hardware, were able to reach top scores in at least two benchmark categories. Even France, which took fourth place, reached two Overdrive records.
Congratulations to the US team, IRONMODS, which proved to be a magnanimous winner, thanking all the other guys for being excellent competitors and great sportsmen. We were glad to have the opportunity to host all these guys, and we'll provide a summary article next week.
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Patrick Schmid was the editor-in-chief for Tom's Hardware from 2005 to 2006. He wrote numerous articles on a wide range of hardware topics, including storage, CPUs, and system builds.
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Pei-chen So what's the final clock speed? You have only posted a "Clock Speeds Reached after Less Than 5 Hours" a few pages back. I assume the team managed to squeeze more performance.Reply -
sacre Of course the American team wins, it was an american contest, based in america, and americans have one hell of an ego, and since their country is failing the only thing they have is little contests that may or may not have been rigged for the americans.Reply
Anywho, GJ, and neat -
nebun if they used some kind of fancy cooling set up then this is really not that great. how many people can really afford to cool their systems for every day use? not many. we need to see more test done an system that people can affordReply -
blackened144 Replyif they used some kind of fancy cooling set up then this is really not that great. how many people can really afford to cool their systems for every day use? not many. we need to see more test done an system that people can afford
This was not the "who can get the most stable overclock using only air cooling and make the CPU last 500 years of 'regular use' contest"... This was a "who could overclock the most using "fancy cooling' with it being just barley stable enough to post the fastest scores before their CPU melted down "OVERDRIVE" contest"..