Between 23rd and the 10th of March 2 crew members of HWBOT (Dennis and Me) did a rally for charity, the Baltic Sea Circle Rally. We drove from Belgium to the North Cape and back, around the Baltic Sea without using highways or GPS in a 37 year old car, in the middle of the winter.
The car
Our rally car was the oldest car out of 82 to reach the finish, and did fairly well! The only issues we had were:
we completely ruined our rear brakes on day 2 because someone forgot to release the handbrake
it was absolutely not waterproof
every pothole we hit the trunk flew open
when temperatures dropped to -15c and below we had to make a campfire underneath the car to get it started
when temperatures dropped to -30c the engine stalled even when driving
we made a detour of 400km in the middle of the night to fetch spare parts for another team
Together with donations from HWBOT members we gathered 1185 euro for the Belgian Children Cancer Foundation, thank you guys! Now we are back, we can start working on HWBOT again!
Between 23rd and the 10th of March 2 crew members of HWBOT (Dennis and Me) will be doing a rally for charity, the Baltic Sea Circle Rally. We are attempting to drive from Belgium to the North Cape and back, around the Baltic Sea without using highways or GPS in a 37 year old car, in the middle of the winter.
If you ever contemplated donating to HWBOT, now is the time as all donations received between now and the 10th of March will be donated to in full to the Belgian Children Cancer Foundation.
PCMARK VANTAGE Hall of Fame top 20 scores can't be submitted bug
We have 13 more open issues reported on our tracker, but the next 2 weeks there will be no active development on HWBOT. Dennis & me will be on an epic road trip to North Cape with an oldtimer, more about this in a next post.
A community poll was created to gauge opinions in whether competitions should count towards your career points or not. Opinions vary, but 2/3rds are in favor one way of the other, so expect competitions points changes to career points soon.
Found an issue and want to have it fixed, or at least be able to point out our lazy devs that the issue has been open for a very long time? Now is your time to shine! We have made a public repo on github so everyone with a github account can create and track issues.
The 8th revision of HWBOT has gone live, but the discussion whether competition points should be included or not in your career ranking remains unsettled. The seasonal league includes the points gained from the best 10 competitions entries. Should we do the same for career?
Arguments in favor of including competition points:
efforts done in reaching a high position in a competition should be awarded with points which last longer than the current season, as it is often harder then gathering points outside of a competition
encourages competition participation
Argument against:
new members can not compete against old members who participated in a lot of competitions in the past, unless the amount competitions which count towards your career are limited
The 8th revision of HWBOT is currently doing a test run on UAT and will go live this Saturday. Thanks all from the crew and community for useful feedback during the development of this new revision!
As revision 8 of the HWBOT rankings are being finalized, please take some time to leave feedback on how many of your submissions you want to have impact on your yearly seasonal ranking, and all time career ranking. Too many and grinding rankings will be needed, too few and there is no distinction between members having a lot of records and those with just a few.
HWBOT Prime has been given a long overdue update today. Fetch version 1.0.1 while it's hot here.
Noticable changes:
clock adjustment cheat detection
compatible with Java 8, 9, 10, 11 without tweaks. Java 7 and lower support has been dropped.
support for a "stability test", aka HWBOT Prime 30min, which searches for the highest prime number in 30 minutes. The highest found after 30 minutes is your benchmark score.
Update 1.0.1:
remove dependency of javasysmon library as many windows machines seem to have problems with it.
Let's take a look at the current standings in the second GIGABYTE contest of the 2018 OC Season
GIGABYTE kicked off their second competition of the 2018 OC Season here on OC-ESPORTS in March with the GIGABYTE AORUS MARCH OC MADNESS 2018 contest. With a little less than 5 days left, it’s time take a quick look at the current leaders, the CPUs and boards being used, the scoring and of course the great prizes up for grabs.
GIGABYTE AORUS MARCH OC MADNESS 2018 Challenge: March 1st – March 31st, 2018
Running throughout the month of March 2018, the contest allows overclockers to use any Intel processor with 6 or less physical cores (disabled cores not allowed). However, to create a more level playing field, processors cannot use CPU core or cache frequencies above 5GHz. Contestants must use a GIGABYTE / AORUS motherboard and submit using the contest wallpaper to ensure only fresh submissions count. The contest spans three separate stages each starting and ending on a different date to keep interest levels peaked throughout. Let’s take a look at the stages to get a snapshot of who looks in the frame for some great hardware prizes from GIGABYTE.
Stage 1: XTU (March 1st – 10th)
In Stage 1 we find Nik (Germany) at the top of the table with a leading XTU score of 2,822 marks. He used a hexa-core Coffee Lake Intel Core i7 8700K running at 5Ghz, a GIGABYTE Z370N WIFI and Corsair DDR4 memory.
Here’s a shot of the rig used by Nik.
Stage 2: GPUPI for CPU - 1B (March 10th - 17th)
Stage 2 bring us to another challenge, this time involving the GPUPI for CPU - 1B benchmark. At the top of the table we have Lucky_n00b (Indonesia) with a score of 3min 8sec 171ms. He achieved this with a GIGABYTE AB350N-GAMING WIFI motherboard, 2048MB DDR4 SDRAM @ 2661MHZ and a RYZEN 5 1600 @ 4989MHZ (+55.92%).
Here’s a shot of the rig used by Lucky_N00b.
Stage 3: 3DMark11 Physics (March 17th - 24th)
jordan.hyde99 leads with 21582 points, using a GIGABYTE Z370N WIFI with a 8700K.
GIGABYTE AORUS March OC Madness: Current Standings
With one week to go, we find the top ten of the overall table for the GIGABYTE AORUS March OC Challenge to look like this:
At this point jordan.hyde99 (Australia) is in a commanding lead at the top of the table, but he is not unchallenged. Bullshooter, Lucky_n00b and Nik still have a good shot at winning the competition, as they did not yet submit for the last stage. Let’s have quick look at the prizes on offer from GIGABYTE:
GIGABYTE released a major revision of Aorus Z370 Ultra Gaming motherboard. Revision 2.0 replaces the 7-phase CPU VRM of the original with a new 11-phase setup that uses stronger ferrite-core chokes that don't whine when stressed. This new revision will be a part of the prize money of the GIGABYTE HWBOT competitions this winter: the AUROS Winter OC Challenge, the currently running AORUS March Madness and the soon to be anounced april competition too!
The company is also including one M.2 SSD heatsink for the upper M.2-22110 slot, which the original lacks. Besides these, the Aorus Z370 Ultra Gaming 2.0 is identical to the original, including its RGB LED diffusers, multiple RGB headers governed by GIGABYTE RGB Fusion software, two reinforced PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slots (x8/x8 when both are populated) with NVIDIA SLI support, one gigabit Ethernet interface driven by an Intel i219-V controller, and a premium onboard audio solution with a headphones amplifier and 120 dBA SNR CODEC (Realtek ALC1220); and a price ranging between $150-$170.
We will be migrating the forums to invision power board today. As all content will be migrated too, we expect this progress to take a whole day. Commenting on submissions and news will not be possible as it is integrated with the forum.
Edit: come say hi in our new forums!
The HWBOT World Tour 2017 landed in Poitiers, France for Gamers Assembly this weekend, hosting overclocking workshops and contests to generally spread the word of overclocking. From a competitive overclocking perspective, the highlight of the event is the Overclocking World Championship, a series of extreme overclocking contests that are held at each World Tour location where winners get a seat at a Grand Final at the end of the year. Yesterday we saw the Qualifier Segment of the contest with twenty overclockers pushing their hardware to the limit to score as highly as possible across three benchmarks. Let’s take a peek at yesterday’s action.
Stage 1: Super PI 32M - In Stage 1 we find current HWBOT league No.1 Dancop of Germany taking top spot. Dancop managed to complete a Super Pi 32M run in just 4min 38sec 922ms, a score made by pushing his Core i7 7700K to 6,798MHz (+61.87%) with system memory configured to 1,800.5MHz (12-17-17-28)(note: all overclockers were given two CPUs which were drawn at random). In second place we have French No.1 Wizerty with a score of 4min 49sec 218ms while orion24 arrived in third place with 4min 54sec 195ms. All the scores from Stage 1 can be found here.
Stage 2: Cinebench R15 - Stage 2 is all about benching Cinebench R15, an area where Niuulh certainly shines, taking the win with a score of 1,461 cb points. This was done with a Core i7 7700K clocked to 6,595.18MHz (+57%) with DDR4 configured at 1,800.1MHz (13-18-18-28). Second place goes to Wizerty with a score of 1,458 cb points while another French Extreme overclocker Mylth arrives in third place with 1,445 cb points. You can find all the Stage 2 scores here.
Stage 3: 3DMark11 Physics - Finally in Stage 3 we face a test using the classic 3DMark11 Physics benchmark. Wizerty tops the table with a score of 18,430 points, pushing his Core i7 7700K to a very healthy 6,654.78MHz with memory pushed to 1,747.4MHz (13-18-18-28). His closest rival is orion24 with 18,076 points while Dancop takes third place with 17,730 points. Check out the scoring for Stage 3 here.
After three hours of furious benching Wizerty, Dancop, orion24 and Niuulh will now contest the Final segment later today. The contest will feature Semi-Finals plus a Bronze Final and a Final, all of which will use a 1v1 format where overclockers compete side by side on the main stage. It should be pretty exciting.
You can check out all the scores from the Qualifier segment here on OC-ESPORTS, plus a replay of all the action from yesterday thanks to the OverClocking-TV Twitch channel where you can also find tonight’s live action.
Just in case you missed it, the latest episode of the OC Show from OverClocking-TV has been available for a few days now. Edition S03E12 as usual covers a great deal of ground with Xyala and Trouffman this time around joined by tech reviewer MrTechQC. Among the broad variety of topics being discussed on the show is the arrival of a new 5G modem from Qualcomm, the launch of the Google Pixel and Pixel XL smartphones (and all the high-end components inside including the latest Android 7 OS). Other gadget related discussion includes a look at the latest 960 Pro 2TB M.2 drives from Samsung.
As usual Xyala gives us a great overview of all the happenings over on OC-ESPORTS where Indonesia’s Lucky_n00b won the HWBOT World Championship Wild Card contest. Lucky_n00b joins the six winners from the HWBOT World Series contests which were held during the World Tour 2016. Interestingly, it was actually the first OC contest on OC-ESPORTS with paid entry. The contest proved to be a tense affair at its climax with Dancop and Lucky_n00b literally tied at the end of it.
Towards the back end of the show the guys get down to discussing the relative merits of the new GTX 1050 and 1050Ti cards from Nvidia. MrTexhQC gives a great break down of the huge potential value of these cards from an enthusiast and overclocking perspective.
Did I mention that they also discuss the possibility of flying hundreds of people to Mars? Plus Trouffman's recent exploits at TwitchCon? Trust me, this show has something for everyone. You can find it here on the Overclocking-TV YouTube Channel.
On October 25 FinalWire released a new stable update to the desktop editions of its popular system information software. AIDA64 v5.80 supports the latest Windows 10 builds and the most recent hardware components, including the AMD RX 400 series and NVIDIA’s GTX 1050 GPUs.
As a new feature, it now allows users to define global hotkeys with which they can enable or disable the AIDA64 hardware monitoring panels or switch between multiple hardware information pages on external displays, even when AIDA64 is running in the background. Using these customized key combinations, PC enthusiasts can also start and stop saving temperature, voltage and power measurements as well as fan RPM readouts to a CSV or HTML log file. The developers have made AIDA64 v5.80 DPI aware so that all elements of its graphical user interface scale properly when the DPI zoom is active in Windows. In practice, this means that users will see no more blurry or incorrectly sized graphics or text on high-resolution screens as AIDA64 now looks crisp even on 4K and 8K LCD and OLED displays.
It’s the time of the week when get all nostalgic and look back at point in time when something truly astounding happened in the world of Overclocking. This week we take you back just a few years to August 2014 when a well respected Finnish overclocker by the name of The Stilt managed to break the World Record for the highest ever CPU frequency.
To the uneducated, Overclocking sounds like it’s simply a matter of raising the clock speed of your computer to make it go faster. In some respects that is mostly true, but an even truer fact is the reality that CPU clock speeds have strict limitations. AMD’s Piledriver architecture CPUs however are designed in such a way that the clock speeds can indeed to pushed to pretty amazing heights, a fact proved so emphatically by The Stilt back in 2014. The talented Finn took an AMD FX-8370, an Octa-core 4.0GHz processor, and pushed it to a massive 8.72GHz, a percentage increase of +118%. The record was made with the Vcore voltage set to a huge 2.064v using an ASUS Crosshair V Formula-Z motherboard and AMD Radeon Performance DDR3 memory clocked at 2,218MHz.
The Stilt's World Record still stands today, but perhaps the fact what makes it all the more impressive is that the FX-8370 was using all 8 cores at the time. Most competing CPU frequency submissions actually only use one or two active cores.
Last week we noted how Greece’s No.1 Overclocker had managed to nail his the World Record for the fastest ever PiFast run hitting a score of 9sec 170ms using a very handy i7 6700K processor clocked at 6,850MHz which is an incredible +71.25% beyond stock settings. Today he just went one better. Or perhaps I should say 10 milliseconds better as he submitted a new World Record breaking score of 9sec 160ms with Sofos1990 managing to squeeze an additional 25MHz out of his Skylake chip, pushing it to 6,875MHz (+71.88%).
Sofos will be pleased with this run which keeps World No.1 Dancop at bay for the time being at least. In fact Dancop did actually manage to equal the original 9sec 170ms record from last week. It will be interesting to see if that extra 10 milliseconds can help keep the World Record in Greek hands for the near future.
Let’s not forget also that with a run of just 4min 25sec and 578ms Sofos1990 is currently the holder of the SuperPi 32M World Record, ousting previous record holder, who is non-other than Dancop, by a margin of 156ms. The score was made using the same i7 6700K pushed to 6,834MHz, a solid +70.85% beyond stock settings. Other notable hardware includes a GIGABYTE Z170X-OC Force LN2 motherboard and a G.SKILL Trident Z DD4 memory kit (3600 C17).
Every month or so we have a look at how well the overclocking teams adopt Rookie and Novice overclockers at HWBOT. The most friendly Rookie teams are based in North America mostly. Just like last month the most Rookie friendly team is the Overclocking Subreddit /r/overclocking which enrolled 30 (+1) Rookies and 67 (+3) Novices. In second place we find ASUS Republic of Gamers from the United States with 26 (+1) Rookies and 25 (+2) Novices. In third place we find the Overclock.net with 17 (-2) Rookies and 50 (-1) Novices. New in the table is the French team from Hardware.fr [HFR] and the US-based team from Tech|inferno.
In the Rookie League, UFDisciple from South Africa and winner of the World Series for Amateurs in Africa is leading with 453.70 points which is 188.9 points more than I_AssassinArka_I from India and 243.7 points more than NFree from Hungary.
Congratulations to all the overclocking teams adopting the new overclockers and of course the Rookies for their dedication to overclocking!
The final qualification round of the World Series Asia contest got underway earlier today with the highest turn out seen on any day of the week. 26 overclockers again went head to head benching on Intel’s latest and greatest Extreme Edition processors in an effort to clinch the final seat in the Semi-Finals on Saturday. The three benchmarks used in today’s three hour qualification round were XTU4GHz (i.e. CPU clocks restricted to 4GHZ frequency or below), 3DMark Fire Strike Physics and Memory Clock Single Channel.
The eventual winner with a pair of outright wins in stages 1 and 2 was in fact yesterday’s 1v1 runner up, the passionate Pole that is known in OC circles simply as Xtreme Addict. In second place we have Swiss No.1 racoon who proved his worth pushing DDR4 memory clocks with a win stage 3. Third place on the podium went to India’s foremost overclocker, Toolius. Here are the prizes and standings for the qualification round:
1st Place: $500 USD: Xtreme Addict (Poland)
2nd Place: $250 USD: Racoon (Switzerland)
3rd Place: $125 USD: Toolius (India)
Note: For several reasons that we will outline here in some detail, the actual 1v1 contestants for day 4 did not end up being the top two on the leaderboard. Xtreme Addict takes his place in the 1v1 as qualification round leader, simple enough. This is where it gets a little more complicated.
Day 1 winner Rauf will not be in Taiwan for the Finals on Saturday and thusly had to concede his place. His place would ordinarily go to Day 1 runner up Hazzan, except that Hazzan already has a place in the finals as 1v1 winner of Day 2. The Finals ticket was then handed to third place finisher Bullshooter who in fact declined due to the fact that he would rather arrive at the final using a GIGABYTE board as opposed to the ASRock boards usedon Day 2 (Note contest rules dictate that overclockers must use the same board in the finals that used in qualification).
This means that his place now goes to Racoon who now claims the Day 1 final berth in the finals with Bullshooter facing Xtreme Addict in the Day 4 1v1 contest. The upshot of this complicated state of affairs means that in Day 4, Bullshooter actually managed to position himself in line for a Semi-Final ticket benching on GIGABYTE.
Bullshooter and Xtreme Addict arrived on the HWBOT mains stage benching on randomly drawn i7 6950X chips and GIGABYTE X99 SOC Champion motherboards. The two contenders saw the random benchmark draw throw out 3DMark Fire Strike Physics, a benchmark that once again was accepted by both overclockers without veto.
With just over ten minutes of bench time remaining, Xtreme Addict was flying high with a score of 33,239, while Bullshooter had not yet actually made a successful run – signs that something was wrong with his system. Possible condensation issues due the humid Taiwan climate, a very real issue in live benching, or possibly just the Gods of irony, with the GIGABYTE board not giving the German the competitive edge he was looking for.
With just seconds to go Bullshooter finally posted a 3DMark Firestrike Physics score of 32,009 points. By the close of the contest however Xtreme Addict had managed to win the 1v1 contest with his score of 33,239.
Congrats to Xreme Addict! The Semi-Final line up for tomorrow will involve Dancop vs Xtreme Addict and Racoon vs Hazzan.
The company is also including one M.2 SSD heatsink for the upper M.2-22110 slot, which the original lacks. Besides these, the Aorus Z370 Ultra Gaming 2.0 is identical to the original, including its RGB LED diffusers, multiple RGB headers governed by GIGABYTE RGB Fusion software, two reinforced PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slots (x8/x8 when both are populated) with NVIDIA SLI support, one gigabit Ethernet interface driven by an Intel i219-V controller, and a premium onboard audio solution with a headphones amplifier and 120 dBA SNR CODEC (Realtek ALC1220); and a price ranging between $150-$170.
