The Cheapaz Chips Season 1 contest on OC-EPSORTS is only days away from its conclusion. For those of you not in know, the contest involves what some would describe as pure overclocking. The focus is less about breaking word records or pushing the frontiers of performance, instead urging overclockers to enjoy the pleasure of pushing cheaper hardware with particular emphasis on old fashioned hardware modding.

The Cheapaz Chips contest has three distinct stages, each involving a GPU benchmark. The real twist? Combatants can only use an entry-level Nvidia GT 710 graphics card, one of the most affordable cards on the market today. The contest started in mid-July and ends in five days time, so let’s have at a look at the standings.

Just as we saw a few weeks ago France’s mercurial orion24 heads the leaderboard with a total score of 144 points thanks to two outright wins in Stages 1 and 3. Since we last looked we can certainly see some improvements in scoring – clearly some sandbagging going on. Two weeks ago orion24 held the lead in Stage 1 with a Catzilla 576p score of 3,979 marks. He now leads the stage with a score of 4,063 marks, altering his GT 710 GPU frequency from 1,868MHz to a lower 1,855MHz. What’s going on? How does a lower clock get a higher score? The secret lies in the memory frequency which has increased from 1,140MHz to 1,190MHz, a tidy +32.22% beyond stock.

Stage 1 basically mirrors the contest as a whole with Macsbeach (Australia) in second place close behind orion24 on 4,053 marks while Aussie mod-master newlife sits in third place on 3,991 marks.

Stage 2 is all about benching on the classic 3DMark01 benchmark. Here we find macsbeach98 in control of things with a score of 63,053 marks. This was achieved with a GT 710 clocked at 1,843MHz (+90.59%) / 1270MHz (+41.11%) plus a Core i7 4790K pushed to 4,900MHz (+22.50%). His nearest competitor is a dark horse for the title from Brazil known as NoMS who scores 62,614 marks with a card pushed to 1850MHz (+91.31%) / 1196MHz (+32.89%).

Finally, in Stage 3 we have contest leader orion24 who has managed a GPUPI 1B run in just 5min 48sec 772ms. His GT 710 in this instance is pushed to 1,934MHz (+100.00%) / 1000MHz (+11.11%). A pair of new faces appear on the podium in second and third place with SDhydro (US) scoring 5min 53sec 155ms using a GT 710 clocked at 1907MHz and GtiJason (US) pushing his card to 1900MHz to score 5mins 53mins 155ms.

With five days to go there is still plenty of tome to see a shake up at the top of leaderboard. In fact there is a good chance that some folks still have a few scores up their sleeves, sandbag style. Check out the Cheapaz Chips contest here on OC-EPSPORTS.

If you enjoy ambient overclocking and modding, you may also enjoy competing in the MSI Godlike OC Season 2: Ambient 2D Battle.