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.

Stage 4: HWBOT X265 BENCHMARK - 4K (March 24th - 31st)

KaRtA is currently in the lead, with 14.72fps.

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 Aorus March OC Madness

Winner prizes

• Intel Core i7 8700K
• GIGABYTE Z370 AORUS Gaming 7
• EK-KIT S240
• G.SKILL F4-3600C17D-16GTZSW TridentZ Series

2nd place prizes

• Intel Core i7 8600K
• GIGABYTE Z370 AORUS Ultra Gaming
• SEASONIC PRIME PLATINUM 850W

3rd place prizes

• G.SKILL F4-3600C17D-16GTZSW TridentZ Series

Lucky draw prizes

• GIGABYTE Z370 AORUS Ultra Gaming
• GIGABYTE Z370 AORUS Ultra Gaming

Check out the contest web page here and keep abreast of all the action in the final days: http://oc-esports.io/#!/round/gigabyte_aorus_march_oc_madness_2018