The revision was installed two days ago, but needed a couple of quick patches yesterday. Next revision updated planned for February 15th.

Release Notes - HWBOT - Version hwbot v4.6.2

Bug

• [HWBOT-600] - User banned, but scores still in ranking + gaining team points
• [HWBOT-668] - Users moving to different team, but points are not
• [HWBOT-683] - Fix enermax logo size (submission)
• [HWBOT-684] - Overview page bug
• [HWBOT-687] - Psu productgroup URL formatting after search
• [HWBOT-695] - User banned when reporting score
• [HWBOT-699] - Competition ranking incorrect

Improvement

• [HWBOT-686] - Update hw database: Enermax
• [HWBOT-688] - Update hw database: Gskill
• [HWBOT-689] - Non-partner product image overlay (hw database and product page)

Story

• [HWBOT-676] - Forum snippet incorrect for wordpress news or challenges
• [HWBOT-678] - Team captain moderator panel broken

Pretty crazy competition to say the least. Tsunamijuan and _mat_ did very well, but there was just no stopping Christian Ney this time. Awesome!

HWBOT.ORG’s competition called GIGABYTE X'MAS & New Year Contest just finished with Christian Ney from Switzerland absolutely smashing all scores in style.

Hardware used:

• GIGABYTE GA-A75-UD4H
• AMD A8-3870K 'Llano' CPU
• Geil Eva Corsa RAM
• Both RAM & CPU Cooled with LN2

Records achieved:

• World Record Llano Reference Frequency at 200MHz
• World Record Llano Memory Frequency at 1752.8MHz & 2nd highest overall global RAM frequency achieved! WOW!!!
• World Record Llano CPU Frequency at 6067.71MHz (also well done to Tsunamijuan and _mat_ for reaching past 6GHz :)

Overclockers are super-nerds and what better way to express happiness than to load up some old school MC Hammer in your submission posts, love it. Christian Ney says… U Can’t Touch This

I reckon AMD will launch the Radeon HD 7990 once they know exactly how fast Nvidia's most high-end card is.

Today, on January 31st, AMD is going to launch HD 7950, the second graphics card from HD 7000 series. This GPU has fewer stream processors, and somewhat lower core and memory clock speeds compared to previously released HD 7970. The HD 7950 should also be cheaper than the 7970. A number of more affordable HD 7xx0 cards will be coming later in the first quarter of this year. MSI yesterday published HD 7900 series infokit, that includes launch dates of AMD HD 77x0 cards, and launch month for HD 78x0.

According to the roadmap, HD7750 and HD7770 will be available on February 15. Both cards will have 1 GB of GDDR5 memory, and from previous reports we also know that the boards will have 900 MHz core frequency, 896 and 832 stream processors, and 56 and 52 texture units. The HD 7770 will be priced at $149, and HD 7750 will be $10 cheaper.

In March AMD will release HD 7850 and HD 7870 GPUs, both featuring 2 GB of RAM. The 78x0 series will have core and memory frequencies, comparable to 77x0 series, however they will pack from 1280 (HD 7850) to 1408 (HD 7870) stream processors, and from 80 to 88 texture units. HD7870 will retail for $299, and HD7850 will be $249.

The roadmap doesn't have launch date for HD 7990 card. Based on older reports, this dual-GPU card may launch in March 2012, and it will cost $849.

Overclockers have always been a bit extreme – we take hardware many people are perfectly satisfied with and then push every last MHz we can out of it within our cooling limits. Some choose air cooling, some choose water cooling. There are a few brave souls that use water chillers, but mostly those are benching operations only.

Then there are the, well, for lack of a better phrase, there are the crazy people. I’m proud to be one and many members of our benchmarking team are too, as are a growing number of the overclocking crowd. You see, when you get into benchmarking, air and water just aren’t enough to satisfy your thirst for that extra 3D Marks or thousandth of a second. No, we truly go to extremes using things like dry ice (with acetone to help spread the cold) and liquid nitrogen.

It is to these overclockers k|ngp|n has dedicated a good portion of his craft. He started out making cooling pots quite a while ago, then turned his successful benchmarking ability and industry know-how into a career with EVGA. Thankfully he hasn’t stopped producing pots.

Today is dedicated to his latest work of art, the Dragon F1 Extreme Dark. It’s very functional of course and we’ll get to that, but this thing is a great looking piece of hardware. Don’t take my word for it though, have a look for yourself.

Urgh, sad news :-(

Back in March, 2009, the industry lost ABIT as a consumer motherboard vendor, as it announced its exit. ABIT had been a reputable vendor of high-end PC motherboards. The company stayed on as a shell to complete honoring warranties, with its website on a little longer, to help with drivers, BIOS, and product manual downloads, among other things. It appears now that the clock for the website has also run out. A notice on the start page of the website says that the website will go offline on the 28th February, 2012. If you have an ABIT product, it would be a good idea to download PDF files of its manuals, a copy of its BIOS (if applicable), and drives, before the website goes down for good.

That awkward moment you have to write an article on how awesome you are at overclocking: "And at ocaholic we are proud to show you how the young professional overclocker Christian Ney set up his system with the ambitious goal to lead the competition and break two World Records at once", published by ... Christian Ney.

There is a Llano competition running at the moment on HWBot.org sponsored by Gigabyte called ''GIGABYTE X'MAS & New Year Contest''. And at ocaholic we are proud to show you how the young professional overclocker Christian Ney set up his system with the ambitious goal to lead the competition and break two World Records at once.

To be honest I failed, concerning the reference clock record. My chip didn't do more than 171 MHz so I was far away from the record and did even worse than other overclockers on air.

...

On the other side it went well for the other two records I wanted to beat. First of all my chip did 5'900 MHz easily at "only" 1.8 volt. Afterward some more tweaking and fiddling about I managed to hit 6'067 MHz which is now the new processor frequency world record on AMD Llano and the first Llano ever over 6 GHz. Of course the CPU was constantly maintained at -196°C during the entire session. That's what LN2 is good for!

Breaking the memory record was way harder. It took me about an hour to break Morstiboy's record which he did with the famous 1 GB Kingston HyperX T1 memory that have excellent BDBG chips. I used a 4 Gigabyte Module with which it is quite a bit tougher to get frequencies above 3 GHz (effective clock speed). The memory kit I used here is a Quad Channel 16GB Evo Corsa 2400 MHz CL11 from GeIL powered by Hynix H9C chips. It scaled quite well with voltage tweaking and cold. The frequency achieved was 1513.6 MHz driving the memory with 2.1v and cooling it at -146°C.

FTW 420, one of the brightest stars on our team, was nice enough to let me do an interview with him. This interview was a little more difficult then normal, as I'm really good friends with FTW and already know so much about him. It's always easier when I myself need to learn more about the person I'm interviewing. Anyhow, here is his interview so that maybe our community can get a more personal feel for our friend, teammate, HWbot team Captain, and full time supporter FTW 420!

FTW 420 is an astounding overclocking due to his dedication to the sport. He's always been very modest about his skills and works very hard. He's been #1 on our team for a really long time now and has held down the #1 Canadian spot for a while to.

• Question: "FTW, what was your initial inspiration to start benchmarking?"
• Answer: "I found OCN when I was looking to upgrade from my old pIII rig, after getting it built I ran some benchies to compare & then started overclocking. OCN had a 3dmark competition running around that time & I gave it a try. I did pretty well at it & that was encouraging, but I really wanted to try to catch up with some of the other guys & kept trying. I was pretty hooked from there, started voltmodding & trying to get things colder & clocked higher from that point on."

...

Okay .. Awkward .. AMD had a pretty good launch with the Radeon HD 7970, NVIDIA however isn’t impressed with the performance of AMD’s new graphics cards and believes that Kepler will have no problems in becoming the fastest GPU around.

For making that claim happene .. they do have to actually launch it though.

"Honestly, we expected more from our competitor’s new architecture," said a high ranking Nvidia official during a meeting with Nordic Hardware. The official also revealed that before the launch of the Radeon HD 7970, its company came up with a series of performance estimates for the HD 7900 series that they were preparing to beat with Kepler.

The Radeon HD 7970 performance however came under these initial estimates, so Nvidia is now confident that its upcoming GPUs won’t have any problems in surpassing the HD 7900 series.

Although Nvidia seems quite confident in Kepler, the company still hasn’t established a launch schedule for its 28nm GPU, a company spokesperson revealing only that Kepler will arrive in the “first half of 2012.”

The same Nvidia representative hinted that the new architecture could launch by the end of March, although a Q2 release could also be a possibility.

Some people already knew the OCP modification, but didn't disclose the information in a way less gifted overclockers could understand. Phil, now #2 in 3DMark11 1x GPU, figured out the modification that helped him push the card over 1600MHz GPU and shared it with the rest of the world.

Top result, top modification, top overclocker!

We all know phil and the fact that he managed to achieve several great scores with his Radeon HD 7970. Today, we are proud to be the world's first who reveal the new OCP mod for the HD 7970. So far it looks like it was a well kept secret, but phil did not hesitate to reveal it to us and then, to everybody else to! Congratulations phil for figuring out the mod. We sincerely wish that everybody overclock their HD 7970 cores at 1700MHz or even more MHz - these cards do have amazing overclocking potential.

Does the mod work? Of course! Before the mod, phil's HD 7970 could only bench 3DMark 11 up to 1550MHz core. After the mod, without pushing it much, it's already up to 1620MHz for 3DMark 11, and still has more potential!

Well done phil, well deserved my friend!