Today we have reached the halfway point of the GIGABYTE March Madness contest on OC-ESPORTS. The contest runs for the entirety of the month of March with stages staggered to end at various points throughout the month. Stage 1 is just days away from closing with Stage 2 opening up immediately after. The contest offers a massive prize pool worth more than $2,500 USD and is open to overclockers from all HWBOT leagues.

At this halfway point we find veteran Extreme overclocker Bullshooter from Germany leading the table with solid performance in the 3DMark Time Spy Physics benchmark. As with all stages in the contest, CPUs are limited to a maximum of 5,003MHz – a way to level the field in terms of binning and an great opportunity to show off your memory overclocking and tweaking skills. Bullshooter’s score of 6,680 marks was achieved using an Intel Core i7 7700K and a GeForce GTX 1060 clocked at 1,620MHz (+15.38%). His choice of memory is a GALAX HoF OC Lab DDR4 kit pushed to 3,748MHz (12-11-11-28). In terms of GIGABYTE motherboard, he opted for a Z270X-UD5.

In second place we find kimandsally from the UK with a devilishly high score of 6,666 marks. Kimandsally also used a Core i7 7700K, this time paired with a GTX 1080 at 1,709MHz (+6.35%) and a G.SKILL DDR4 kit pushed to 3,734MHz (15-15-15-32). The motherboard used was a GIGABYTE Z270X-Gaming 7.

In third place we find YouTuber extraordinaire, Buildzoid who opted for a GIGABYTE Z270N-WIFI board (largely due to its memory optimized, dual-slot configuration). Using an i7 7700K and an R9 Fury at stock he managed to configure his Geil SUPER LUCE DDR4 kit to 3,538MHz (14-18-18-28) which puts him very close to equal second place with a score of 6,665 marks.

Stage finishes in just a few days, after that we turn our attention to Stage 2 which is all about tweaking memory and OSes for the Geekbench3 Multi-core benchmark. Make sure to check out the standings and scores of the GIGABYTE March Madness contest here on the OC-ESPORTS website.