This Thursday we return to a day back in October 2009 when HWBOT put together its first ever ‘official’ overclocking contest - the HWBOT Country Cup 2009. The contest ran for seven weeks, kicking off on November 4th and ending on December 24th. It turned out to be a good idea and generally quite a successful contest, laying down the groundwork for many of the OC contesst that we have running on OC-ESPORTS today. This is what we wrote on October 25th 2009 by way of an introduction:

Wake up everyone!! HWBot is excited to present its first official competition. The concept is completely different from all other competitions so far, so let us explain. The competition consists of seven benchmarks spread over seven weeks. In other words, chances are big that you will not have the time to submit a world record breaking result, which makes it interesting to see who will come up with the best result within a very limited time-frame. The results are grouped per country and countries are ranked based on the average score of the top-3 submissions. So, in order to win, you will have to motivate your fellow overclockers to submit good results. Per stage, countries are awarded points and the country that gathered most points at the end of seven stages wins the competition.

The first ever Country Cup was widely regarded as a success. How does one actually gauge success? Well, after the dust settled we shared some of the numbers generate by the HWBOT Country Cup 2009.

Over the last 7 weeks, a total of 680 results have been submitted to this competition by 262 unique users. Those 262 users are member of 68 different overclocking teams and originate from 33 different countries!

The HWBOT Country Cup remains one of the most popular contests organized by HWBOT with really good participation and general interest levels each and every year since its inception. In fact the 2017 edition of the contest is is just a matter of weeks away. Watch this space for more details.

You can find the original post from October 2009 here.