The GIGABYTE Summer Spectacular contest kicked off on May 1st, offering an array of attractive prizes worth a total of $2,500 USD. The contest is designed to entice overclockers of all budgets, which means it's not about folks with big pockets rolling out their Titan cards and their ten-core Broadwell-E chips. Nope. All combatants are challenged to use Intel’s Core i3 7350K processor and Nvidia’s GT 730 graphics cards.

One overclocker that has certainly been motivated to compete in the contest is YouTube extraordinaire Buildzoid. Armed just enough LN2 and a GIGABYTE Z270N-WIFI motherboard, he set himself the task of competing in Stage 1 of the contest last weekend. Stage 1 was open until midnight on Sunday and involved pushing the unlocked Kaby Lake i3 chips as far as possible making runs in the GPUPI for CPU 1B benchmark. The cool thing is that Buildzoid also live streamed the entire session and uploaded it to his YouTube channel. Pretty sweet, no? The result of the session was a decent GPUPI fpr CPU run of 8min 51sec 501ms, which places him in seventh place on the contest leaderboard.

You can catch the entire benching session here on his YouTube channel. Now that Stage 1 of the GIGABYTE Summer Spectacular contest has closed, the focus turns to Stage 2 and the 3DMark Ice Storm benchmark. Buildzoid and other competing overclockers will be faced with the task of pushing the affordable Nvidia GT 730 card to the max. Will that involve a power mod or two? I have a feeling that it might. Watch this space.