Regular visitors of the forum will have noticed that in the Reseller Center of the forum, Der8auer is offering pretested LN2 CPUs for sale through his employer Caseking. For the overclockers who enjoy going after World Records and Global First Places, this is a great opportunity to skip the binning process and acquire a competitive CPU. For detailed information on how the processors are pretested and how to lay your hands on one, please refer to the forum thread. In this news article, we want clear up why we support this program.

First of all, it's widely recognized that a high quality CPU is required to break World Records and achieve Global First Places. Through feedback and statements from overclockers competing at the top, it is also known that binning CPUs is an expensive process as for each CPU you buy to test, you'll make a small loss at resale. For example, if you find a great one after 50 tested and make a $10 loss per CPU, you'll have spent $500 just binning. This program addresses this issue and allows more people to acquire a competitive CPU without additional variable binning cost.

Secondly, we support the idea of an open market for CPU binning. The binning of CPUs has been a "black market" (not available to the general public) phenomenon for a long time. Often, to get a competitive CPU you need to know the person who is doing the binning. The open market has two major consequences. One, it allows anyone to purchase a competitive CPU at the published price and 2) it allows for other sellers to enter the market. On the long run, the open market dynamics should make prices more competitive as well as an increase in product quality.

Thirdly, it enables us to study the macroeconomic impact of the performance enthusiast community. In general terms, overclockers vastly underestimate the impact of business interest of the companies that build hardware for overclocking. Simply put: we get our easy-to-overclock K-SKU processors because the company makes a good chunk of profit on them. This may be frustrating for those who are passionate about overclocking and feel it's deterring from the soul of overclocking. But on the other hand, it's also a great insight on how to move overclocking forward. Simply put: more overclockers means overclocking is more important. Via this program we can enhance our comprehension of the economics of (extreme) overclocking which, in turn, may help uncover new ways to fund big overclocking projects like the HWBOT World Tour.

In conclusion, we hope this program makes it easier for more people get a competitive CPU if your interest is in breaking records, will bring an open market dynamic where several 'binners' compete on price and quality and will help us better understand the macroeconomic effects of the extreme overclocking community.

WHAT WE DO NOT WANT is to reduce overclocking to a simple binning-buying-benching activity. Hence why we make an explicit distinction between overclockers who enjoy competing for benchmark records and those who want to be competitive in the HWBOT Overclockers League, the seasonal OC-ESPORTS Official World Overclocking Ranking or the HWBOT World Series and World Championship. Our objective is to ensure that the overall leaderboards represent the skill of the overclocker rather than their purchasing power. In light of this, we want to point you a couple of forum threads in which we discuss the Adjustment of Global/Hardware Points, community competitions and (coming soon) the detailed rules of the HWBOT World Series 2016 tournament.