ASUS Advanced Overclocking Championship 2008

Day two was all about shattering records. For some teams, though, it was merely a chance to play with near unlimited Ln2 rather than make the record books. “Oh, it’s a slog, this kind of thing, but we’re not really in the running,” said a member of the British team. “This is just for ourselves, really.”

“The ones to watch are the Fins and Swedes, and the Japanese. They’re keen,” said the South African lads, while they were rebuilding their foam enclosure. Keen indeed, though between the intense focus to shatter a record, and a pretty serious language barrier, it was hard to get much out of the team except for smiles and sign language (though they did quite happily exclaim “Fucked!” when their hardware proved problematic). The Fins, Italians and Swedes were similarly focused on their attempts, tweaking and constantly attending to every facet of their tri-SLI, Ln2-cooled rig.

Which, in the end, paid off, but not quite so well as had been hoped. The Sweden/Finland/Italian combine managed a second fastest global Vantage score with their crazy three-pipe tri-SLI set-up, but no records were actually broken. “We could have done it with more time,” said one OC viking, “but we got distracted towards the end.”


Super-cooled gas under the bridge
So, after 1600 litres of Ln2 had sublimed into nothingness, the day, and the event, drew to a close. It’s difficult to measure the success of something like this. The issues with hardware selection may cast a pall over the proceedings, but certainly Asus was happy, and Benson Lim had a big smile on his face. The overclockers were certainly happy, having near endless amounts of precious cooling fluid to play with, and a rare chance to meet and compare notes with the best of their fraternity.

But was the crowd happy? Was it a successful event from a spectator’s point of view?

The key point, to our eyes, was when we spotted a young girl, no more then twelve years old, looking on with excitement at the gushing vapour. She was enthralled of course. And when someone explained to her what it was all about... she seemed to look on the affair with a kind of magic. If we want enthusiast grade computing to continue to grow, events like these are a must.

Job’s a good’un, as my new Brit overclocking mates would say.