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:

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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.