As the Overclocking Season 2017 gets under way, so too do the partner contests on OC-ESPORTS. This season were are proud to bring you a series of great Overclocking contests sponsored by GIGABYTE. The first GIGABYTE contest of the year is the March Madness contest, a contest that spans four individual stages with benchmarks largely chosen with emphasis on CPU performance. As an added twist, the contest also implements a frequency cap of 5,003MHz, meaning that competing Overclockers will have to find ingenious ways to tweak their systems beyond simply pushing CPU frequencies.

GIGABYTE March Madness: March 1st - March 31st

The March Madness contest gets underway on OC--ESPORTS on March 1st and continues until March 31st. Here is a breakdown of the individual stages involved:

• Stage 1: 3DMark Time Spy Physics
• Stage 2: Geekbench3 (Multi Core)
• Stage 3: X265 1080P
• Stage 4: Intel XTU (Multi Core)

In terms of hardware restrictions for the GIGABYTE march Madness contest, it’s actually very simple. Overclockers are allowed to use any single-core, dual-core or quad-core processor on any GIGABYTE motherboard. The main caveat is that CPU frequencies are restricted to no more than 5,003MHz with the CPU cache multiplier lower or equal to core multiplier. These limitations mean that there is less emphasis on which Overclocker has the most potent CPU, and more emphasis on which Overclocker has the most potent tweaking skills. These include both memory tweaking and OS tweaks - an entire realm of tweaking madness awaits!

Read the full article here on OC-ESPORTS.