Unless you have either been occupied preparing the Skylake launch of today or been living under a rock for the past three weeks, you're most certainly aware that we're currently hosting the annual HWBOT Team Cup 2015. You can find a lot more information on the competition in our launch article posted on the front page.

In Stage 1 of the GPU sub-competition the teams are asked to get the lowest possible score in Aquamark3. The peculiar characteristic of this stage is that Aquamark3 is a fixed-frame benchmark, meaning it measures the time it takes to render a specific set of frames. This is different from for example 3DMark benchmarks, which measure how much data is rendered during a certain timeframe. Long story short: low Aquamark scores take longer to render than fast Aquamark scores.

Two days ago, BenchBrothers.de submitted their contribution to the competition stage for the German AwardFabrik team. Combining an underclocked AMD Athlon II X2 250 at 50 MHz with a powerful GeForce 8400 GS at 81/50 MHz, he scores 20 points. Or better put: 77 hours of (stable) benchmarking!

Check out the submission page here for more information. Oh, and in case you're wondering: TeamAU's World Record is 593932 points, which is just a bit shy of 3 million percent faster.