Pretty hilarious report of the PCGH EOS.III OC event, written by Belgian overclocker Leeghoofd. A pretty crazy-awesome event certainly deserves this kind of crazy-awesome article. Enjoy the read!

(PS: we also uploaded about 125 pictures to the HWBOT Facebook page: link)

Once in a while Team Madshrimps get's invited to attend a Team overclocking event. Is it because people like us for who we are ? Because of our looks ? The knowledge we can share ? Well to be honest we don't care about the previous. Most important thing on our own list is the abundant presence of free food and drinks. Secondly if the event is related to torturing PC Hardware, then we don't mind a long drive. Wickedly enough after each event, we get invited to the next upcoming one. So at least we must be doing something good. Time to get in the HWBot company war (in reality it's Massman's dad's) and start the drive towards the 3rd EOS event at the cute town, called Heilbronn in Germany

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Nice score but an even nicer home made controller. DIY at its best!

We’ve spotted a new world record over at HWBOT.ORG yesterday for the single card 3DMARK06. Youngpro, from Australia, used the GIGABYTE Z77X-UD3H board and a somewhat new GIGABYTE GTX680OC GPU.

It is good to see the new GTX680 cards are starting to finally make a small mark on records. It did require some interesting home made controller board mods from what we can see in the photos which we hope to bypass once the GIGABYTE GTX680SOC(Super Overclock) cards come out.

Well done youngpro, keep that Z77X-UD3H rockin'!

Redmax presents the story of his MSI MOA Americas 2012 qualification adventure. Nice and interesting read!

MOA or the Master Overclockers Arena is a MSI sponsored overclocking event designed to bring attention to MSI hardware and give overclockers a chance to gain notoriety in the field. Now I have participated in a few online overclocking competitions before with no real success other than saying I participated. Personally, I look back on those events and feel that my failures were split between hardware selections (the binning process) and skill. Knowing this I set out with a different approach to the MOA qualifier.

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Lessons Learned

I was at a disadvantage going into the competition due to my decision to keep with X79 for all of the benchmarks. Had I used a Z77 or Z68 motherboard my SuperPi 32M score would have been better and I might have had a better chance at getting a higher score in 3DMark 03. All things considered I did extremely well in 3DMark 11 and was within 100 marks of 4th place.

As we know overclocking isn't guaranteed nor are you guaranteed a good GPU even if you pay extra for a Lightning edition video card. What get is a video card designed for overclocking matched with whatever chip MSI decides to slap on there. Extreme overclockers like them because there are no modifications to make and hardware enthusiasts like them because they are custom PCBs and come with a factory overclock.

Assuming I did spend the extra bucks to run both LGA 2011 and LGA 1155 I would have been in the contest for the cost of new hardware, namely a new Z68 or Z77 motherboard. My current 2600K will do 5.7Ghz but I really needed 5.9Ghz to be competitive. (e.g. in the top 1% of golden Sandy Bridge processors). People get golden processors all the time and the majority of them don't even know it. The way I see it, I got lucky once and the chance of getting something worse was greater than getting something better.

All things considered I felt my MOA bid was a strong one, I learned some stuff and was able to grab the attention of some folks who, had otherwise, never paid much attention to me before. Neither of which are a bad thing.

Seems like a little internal communication failure inside Nvidia. The GTX670 seems to clock quite well; a new GTX 275 is born?

In our launch review of the GeForce GTX 670 2GB graphics card this week, we had initially mentioned that these $399 graphics cards would support SLI, 3-Way SLI and even 4-Way SLI configurations thanks to the pair of SLI connections on the PCB. We received an update from NVIDIA later on that day that in fact it would NOT support 4-Way SLI.

The message from NVIDIA was pretty clear cut: "As I’m sure you can imagine, we have to QA every feature that we claim support for and this takes a tremendous amount of time/resources. For the GTX 680 and GTX 690, we do support Quad SLI and take the time to QA it, as it makes sense for the extreme OC’ers and ultra-enthusiasts who are shooting to break world records."

My reply: "But with the similarities between the GTX 680 and the GTX 670, is there really any QA addition required to enable quad for 670? Seems like a cop-out to me man..."

I saw it mostly as a reason to differentiate the GTX 670 and the GTX 680 with a feature since the performance between the cards was very similar; maybe too similar for NVIDIA's tastes with the $100 price difference.

Well this afternoon we received some good news from our contact at NVIDIA: "Change in plans.....we will be offering 4-Way SLI support for GTX 670 in a future driver."

So while the 301.34 driver will not support 4-Way configurations with the GTX 670, 4-Way SLI will in fact be enabled after all in a future version. We'll be sure to keep you in the loop when that happens and the super-extreme enthusiasts can rejoice.

This does go to show that the fundamental differences between AMD's license-free and seemingly more "open" CrossFire technology and NVIDIA's for-fee SLI technology. With enough feedback and prodding in the right direction, NVIDIA can and does do the right thing, just look at the success we had convincing them to support SLI on AMD CPU platforms last year.

Feet to the fire everyone!

Interesting follow-up on the Ivy Bridge TIM debate. What do you guys think about this?

It's proven: the thermal interface material (TIM) used by Intel, inside the integrated heatspreader (IHS) of its Core "Ivy Bridge" processors are behind its higher than expected load temperatures. This assertion was first made in late-April by an Overclockers.com report, and was recently put to test by Japanese tech portal PC Watch, in which an investigator carefully removed the IHS of a Core i7-3770K processor, removed the included TIM and binding grease, and replaced them with a pair of aftermarket performance TIMs, such as OCZ Freeze and Coolaboratory Liquid Pro.

PC Watch findings show that swapping the TIM, if done right, can shave stock clock (3.5 GHz, Auto voltage) temperatures by as much as 18% (lowest temperatures by the Coolaboratory TIM), and 4.00 GHz @ 1.2V temperatures by as much as 23% (again, lowest temperatures on the Coolaboratory TIM). The change in TIM was also change the overclockability of the chip, which was then able to sustain higher core voltages to facilitate higher core clock speeds. The report concluded that Intel's decision to use thermal paste inside the IHS of its Ivy Bridge chips, instead of fluxless solder, poses a very real impact on temperatures and overclockability.