Seeing as today is a Thursday we going to take you back to a day in August 2014 when Xyala (known to many of us as Timothée) wrote an article that stemmed from a trip he and Massman took in Europe. Along the way between France, Belgium, Germany and Holland, they joined up with Roman ‘der8auer’ hartung to who was helping GIGABYTE out with the EOC 2014 overclocking competition. The event took place in lieu of GIGABYTE’s GOOC contest which had by this point long since been abandoned. What transpired certainly inspired Tim to put pen to paper and lay out many of his thoughts about the OC community and the future of OC competitions and competitive overclocking in general. Here’s a sample:

The GIGABYTE EOC competition appeared after the company stopped running its annual overclocking championship called GOOC. Eager to continue the live overclocking competitions in Germany, local overclocker Der8auer took it upon himself to initiate the EOC project. Supported by the local German office, the event took off and this year it was organized for the third time.

“The point I want to make in this editorial are a couple of thoughts related to EOC and similar type of community initiated live overclocking events. This year, 2014, marks a new top in terms of the amount of overclocking competitions. Counting both offline and online overclocking competitions, we are well over 50. Hardware manufacturers like MSI with MOA, HyperX with the OC Takeover and ASUS in Europe with AOOC are still actively putting together quality live overclocking events for the extreme overclockers. Of course the budgets for these competitions are far larger than that of a small(er) community-initiated event like EOC. But what EOC proves is that the community itself is capable of much more than simply participating in events! The community can become the main driver of the OC spirit; it spread the passion that many Rookies want to experience too!”

You can read the full article from August 24th 2014 here. It’s a well thought out, well written piece that summarizes the challenges that competitive overclocking faces in trying to become self assertive and independent of the hardware industry.