The HWBOT team landed in Yogyokarta, Indonesia for the Asia Pacific leg of the HWBOT World Tour. As well as the World Series contest which pits extreme overclockers against each other in a bid to win place in the World Championship finals in December, one the highlights of the Asia Pacific leg of the Tour was also the AOCT contest. AOCT stands of Amateur Overclocking Tournament. It’s been held annually in Indonesia for several years by the guys at JagatReview, the country’s biggest PC enthusiast news, reviews and overclocking website. It’s an amateur contest like you have never seen before. Click the image to the right and check it out.

On the second day of the event AOCT contest kicked into Motherboard Battle mode. This is a challenge where teams of amateur overclockers that managed to make it out of the qualifying rounds the previous day are invited to compete again. The main twist is that they have to prove themselves on four different motherboards from four different vendors. Not an easy task for many amateurs who may not have encountered BIOSes from each vendor before, not to mention the other idiosyncratic features and implementations that are specific to each vendor.

Eight teams of two overclockers had the chance to overclock on motherboards from ASUS, BIOSTAR, GIGABYTE and MSI with teams given 30 minutes to bench on each round. Each rig used a Core i5 660k processor with a default Intel cooler (no sub-zero cooling on this one). Teams are allowed to upgrade the cooler but only within the 30 min time frame, a fact that may affect the time available for tweaking the system. As you can see in the video, there were some quite ingenious cooling tweaks going on. Memory was provided by Corsair with PSUs from World Tour sponsor Seasonic and benchtables from Open Benchtable Project.

Luckily for us OverClocking-TV were on hand with a live stream of the event, so none of the action was missed. The OC-TV YouTube channel has the event covered with Part 1 available here, and Part 2 of the Motherboard Battle available here.