GOC2007 – Gigabyte Overclocking Competition – Jakarta
Last weekend I was once again honored to participate in an international overclocking competition on behalf of Team.AU (Team Australia).
This time contestants from around the Asia-Pacific region gathered in Jakarta Indonesia, home to some great overclocking talent and may I say one of the finest overclocking event organizers, Benny Lodewijk and his team at PT.Nusantara Eradata. Sponsored by Gigabyte, nVidia, Intel, and a foray of other great hardware companies the platform was set for another extreme overclocking face-off.
The competition spanned two days, with Day 1 being for local Indonesians vying to secure one of two places in Day 2’s international showdown. I was not there to witness Day 1; however you can pop by our friends at www.ocindo.com for more info.
I flew in on Friday night (Day 1) from Singapore, suit case in tow (full of tools and cooling hardware) and was taken to a rather luxurious hotel in central Jakarta called the Sultan, formerly the Hyatt. There I was met in the foyer by Tim Handley, my good friend from Gigabyte Taiwan, and a host of international OC’ers who had also arrived recently.
Without time to waste, we unloaded and made out way to the plush hotel bar to kick the celebrations off.
Top Left: Tim Handley (Gigabyte)
Left to Right: XXXXXXX (PT.Nusantara Eradata), Sung-Hae Park (South Korea), RX88 (Singapore photographer), NightRaven (Singapore), Harshal (India), Anti-X (aka Lok – Hong Kong), Benny (Indonesia and chief organiser), T_M (Australia)
Day 2 – we had the luxury of sleeping in till after 9am, and met in the foyer to make our way to the Convention Center (opposite hotel). I think there were a few headaches being carried including my own.
We arrived at the venue, which at the same time was hosting Indonesia’s largest IT expo “IndoComtech”. Making our way to the arena, we were quick to get underway with setting up for the big contest.
The hardware we were using on the day was a mixed bag; nice mobo’s and CPUs but horrible graphics and memory. But we had to make best with what we had, and most contestants didn’t bother with more than aircooling for their 8600GTS’s.
Just prior to the start of the benchmarking, we were ‘treated’ to some local dancing talents
And with that the competition was underway.
Each benchmark (Everest Memory Read, SuperPI 8M, 3DMark’01, AquaMark3, 3DMark’06, and PCMark’05) had 30 mins with which to submit you best score, and 5 mins break in between each.
Unfortunately I don’t have any photos from during the session as I was too busy trying to fix faults. I was one of the few (or only) to attempt attaching a pot to the 8600GTS, which proved to be a difficult task to get right given only 2 mounting holes diagonally across the bare core. Needless to say, I had a terrible mount the first boot and killed my GFX card immediately which I proved after about 3 remounts and finally trying on air. So after a GFX card swap (thanks Thailand) I was finally up and running albeit on air.
Everest was quite easy to have fun with, particularly on a system that you’ve never used before. Small increments in clocks and tweaking the memory made for steady increments on score which you could run successively very quickly. Eventually there were about 3 teams relatively neck and neck, then a few scattered in the middle, and then a few down much farther for some reason.
I was running my Q6700 at 4.8GHz single core (480 x 10) on 1.8V, memory was quite horrid (Promos) so I think I was running about 576+ 5-4-4-8 on 2.3V.
Next up was SuperPI 8M and with a strong CPU I was confident of a decent placing. Straight up I ran 4.6GHz for 2m21s with untweaked and bad timings. Then I threw in some PL and CW and jumped straight down to 2m17s which was good enough for the lead for at least 10 minutes. That’s when I started hitting errors after clock increase which cost me time to solve and eventually I found my tRFC = 30 was too tight, but after too long trying different things I ran out of time and ended up with 3rd place in that bench.
Midway and the nVidia girls took to the stage for promotional activity, and who can resist 
Onto 3DMark’01 and that’s when my day took a turn for the worse. No matter what clock speeds I ran and what tweaks/timings my system would consistently BSOD at the end of CL when it should have been loading CH. I tried reducing all clocks to stock, voltages to stock, modified tweaks, total CMOS clear/battery removal but to no avail.
Figuring it was a corrupt install, I tried a different hard drive. But even that didn’t work with the test still causing BSOD after CH.
By now I’d run out of time to run any 3D’01 and had to move onto AM3. And what do you know, BSOD every time the score screen tried to load.
Moved onto my 3rd and final HDD and by now I was pulling my hair out. Nothing I could do would get the system to run a full benchmark 
Time went on and I was becoming a bit of an attraction for spectators who were wondering why a large groan would come from my end of the arena every few minutes. Oh well, everyone has their bad/unlucky days.
By the time 3DMark’06 rolled around I had thrown in the towel and retired, as had a number of other teams who suffered hardware failures (2 blown motherboards, dead GFX, etc). A few other teams had decided to continue the competition by combining hardware, so I think in the end there was Indo-Thailand team, Singapore-Hong Kong, etc.
Here’s photographs of the festivities that followed the end of the event:
1st – Indo-Thailand, 2nd – Indonesia, 3rd – Vietnam
Following the event we were taken out on the town in a bus to a nice seaside restaurant (aka rice and beer next to the shore and a power station). We were forcefully loaded up with Bintan/Heineken and various local fast foods, with consumption at the table somewhere in the order of 150-200 beers and about a million dishes.
No photos of this all sorry, I forgot to take my camera out but I’m sure there’s others with evidence 
Afterwards we made our way back to the hotel where we posed for a final photo and some well earned sleep.
Many thanks to Gigabyte for there huge support of this event, and Benny for his tireless (literally, he stayed awake for about 48hrs) efforts in organizing and ensuring we were all taken care of.
Cant wait or next year’s!!!
