Overclocking, overclocking, and much more! Like overclocking.

1 – About HWBOT Competition Engine (HCE)

Overclocking is more than just increasing your system’s performance, it’s a game, it’s a competition, a battle to be the fastest.HWBOT Competition Engine is HWBOT’s in-house developped competition engine, allowing us to configure complex overclocking competitions quickly. It combines the popular HWBOT platform for submitting and comparing overclocking results with online competitions.

1.2 – Important HCE information!

The HWBOT Competition Engine was mainly build to help overclocking communities host their internal forum challenges. After the first conceptualization, we decided to make this feature more flexible so it could also be used for global overclocking competitions. The competition engine is, in essence, nothing more than an extention of the HWBOT engine. This means that participation, rankings, results and everything else related to the competition is build on the same foundations as the normal rankings and competitions at HWBOT. This way, participating users understand how the competition works in an instant.

One very important aspect of HCE-based competitions is that we do not force anyone to participate. By this, we mean that every single submission to the competition was submit by the user and not at random. The participation figures are, in other words, indicating actual participation. Or else: Every single participant of a HCE competition is active and interested!

At the moment of writing, April 26 2011, HWBOT has hosted 61 competitions, engaged 1104 unique overclockers to submit over 6000 results. Our most popular competition thusfar was our very own HWBOT Country Cup 2010, which is pretty much the World Cup for overclocking nations. In this competition, no less than 313 (active!) overclockers submit 872 results.

2 – HWBOT Competition Engine Concept

2.1 – Competition Ranking

The final ranking of a competition is based on who gathered the most amount of points in each round (stage). The points are distributed similar as in Formula 1: 10 points for first place, 8 for second, etc. The ranking is calculated as soon as the last stage of the competition ends.

Note: the point distribution can be configured for each competition separately and fully customized. Currently we have point scoring algorithms based on default ranking (10-8-6-…), relative score compared to baseline score (percentual ranking) as well as unbalanced stages (stage 1 more weight than stage 2).

2.2 – Competition Stage

A competition may exist out of multiple stages. Eg. the first week you have to submit a SuperPi 32M score, the second week a 3DMark Vantage score, etc. Multiple stages may run at once, but normally they the next stage does not start before the first ends.

Stages can be considered a competition within the competition. Each stage has its own ranking, based on the results submitted to this stage.

2.3 – Stage Limitations

Limitations may be defined for each stage. All submissions must apply to all limitations, otherwise they are not accepted. The HWBOT engine will automatically prevent you from submitting scores which do not apply to the limitations. New limitation types can be added upon request, like using a specific memory manufacturer, using specific cooling, etc.

Currently, the HWBOT Competition Engine has 38 default configured stage limitations:

- Processor model, e.g. Intel Core 2 E8500
- Processor core, e.g. AMD Deneb
- Processor subfamily, e.g. AMD Phenom II
- Processor frequency, e.g. Maximum 4GHz
- Graphics card model, e.g. Intel Core 2 E8500
- Motherboard manufacturer, e.g. MSI
- Cooling, e.g. Only watercooling
- Region, e.g Americas
- …

2.4 – Achievements

A competition can be configured to create achievements for reaching a certain position in the competition ranking. Eg. if you win the “AMD Phenom II X4″ competition, you might recieve a “Phenom II Guru” achievement in your profile.