Day 2 of the Overclocking World Championship – Las Vegas 2017 Qualifier contest concluded just a matter of hours ago. Whereas day 1 involved eight Overclockers battling it out on three benchmarks, Day 2 consisted of Semi-Finals, Bronze Final and a Grand Final. The prize at stake is a seat at the World Championship Final at the end of the year.

The Semi-Finals saw US Elite Overclocker steponz paired off against Indonesia’s bboyjezz, plus a match between Japan’s DogmaOCer and Lucky_n00b, another Indonesian OC legend. steponz managed to overcome bboyjezz, while Lucky_n00b beat DogmaOCer – all of which set up a mouth watering Final pairing between Lucky_n00b and the steponz.

Both Overclockers were using an Intel Core i7 7700K ‘Kaby Lake’ processors, plus the latest GIGABYTE Z270X-Gaming SOC motherboards. In the initial benchmark draw the HWBOT x265 1080p benchmark was rejected by Lucky_n00b. The next benchmark out of the hat was SuperPi 8M, a pretty fast benchmark that is both CPU frequency, cache and memory sensitive. As with all OCWC Qualifier 1v1 contests, only 30 minutes were allowed, which means getting scores on the board early on can be a great advantage that puts pressure on your opponent.

The first score on the board came from the extremely experienced Lucky_n00b, posting a score of 1min 14.520sec within the first five minutes of the contest. Things didn’t seem to be going too well for steponz who experienced a few BSODs in the early stages. Meanwhile Lucky_n00b was scoring freely, hitting 1min 10.242sec as we approached the ten minute mark with the Core i7 7700K clocked at 6.2GHz at 1.8v. A very decent configuration in such a short time frame.

As we approached the conclusion of the Final, steponz conducted a few stability checks to eliminate the issues he was facing, finally posted a impressive score of 1m 6.726sec. This was a score that put him firmly back on track, being just ahead of what Lucky_n00b could squeeze out of his system. In the end, after several improved scores, Lucky_n00b bowed out with a run of 1min 5.131sec, while steponz managed to push his system to achieve a run in just 1m 2.069sec.

A huge congrats to both Overclockers, but especially to steponz for his ability to perform so coolly under pressure. We will be back with a full review of the action from Day 2 shortly. In the meantime however, you can catch a full rerun of the Final with some fantastic coverage from OverClocking-TV right here.