The HWBOT World Tour 2016 got underway today at the Computex trade show in Taipei, Taiwan. Kicking off with a press conference where attendees were treated to presentations and speeches from key event partners, CyberMedia, Intel, ZADAK511, Seasonic and AOC, the OC action quickly got underway with 24 Elite and Extreme overclockers competing on three benchmarks; Cinebench - R11.5, HWBOT Prime and 3DMark Vantage – CPU Performance.

Arguably the most interesting aspect of the competition was the fact that this would be the first time ever that any overclockers out side of the industry got to get hands on with Intel’s Broadwell E in the shape of the new top dog in town, the Core i7 6950X processor – the ten core / twenty thread beast that we’d all been so eagerly awaiting.

After three hours of competitive benchmarking with several hundreds of liters of LN2 being used, the eventual prize winning top three were as follows:

1st Place: $500 USD: Hazzan (Indonesia)

2nd Place: $250 USD: Rauf (Sweden)

3rd Place: $125 USD Bullshooter (Germany)

Hazzan made it to his first ever live final after taking first place in Stages 1 and 2. After a quick random benchmark draw, Cinebench R15 was accepted by both overclockers. Rauf quickly made a good start meaning that Hazzan had to play catch up from the early stages. With around six minutes left Rauf was sittings on a score of 2,459 cb points with Hazzan struggling to really make the Broadwell E cores dance, sitting on a score of 2,295. In the end, with the clock running out for Hazzan the Indonesian ran into a spot of trouble with the first BSOD on the 1v1 Face Off which all but spelled disaster for Hazzan. His fate was then compounded as Rauf completed a run with a score 2,506 cb points. That score was improved upon with a final score from the talented Swede of 2,586 cb points, a score which booked his place in the Semi-Finals on Saturday.

Don’t forget you check out all the scores from the qualification round on the World Series Asia contest page on OC-ESPORTS.

Make sure you follow all the action from tomorrow on the OverClocking-TV Twitch channel: