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Overdrive: Germany's Team Is Chosen

04:40 - Wednesday 3 December 2008 by THG Team

9. Joined At The Hip
10. Custom Engineering
11. Too Much Prep, Not Enough Benchmarking
12. All Dressed Up, No Time To Go
13. When Cold Meets Warm...
14. A Tad Too Small
15. Don't Short It: Condensation Forms
16. Setting The Custom Cooling Aside
17. Consultations between jury and team

The German regional of Tom’s Hardware’s Overdrive overclocking competition came to a close late last month (see the news post Overclocking Competition: Germany Edges Past USA 8-2 for a breakdown of the scores).

The three members of the team "Benchbros" were declared the winners after a 10 hour competition. The crew, made up of David Schöppe, Manuel Wiesner, and Andreas Bock, produced record results in eight of the ten categories, achieving a clock speed of 5.9 GHz on the Intel Core 2 Duo E8600 and an MSI P45 motherboard. The winning team prepared for the task even before the event. The consensus was that the trio reached the limitations of its P45-based motherboard and processor, though the hand-selected Kingston memory modules running at DDR3-2000 didn’t even come close to their limits.

The MacSafe team chose an unusual strategy—something we didn’t see in the US—cooling the graphics card via copper sheeting, which was affixed to a self-made pot. This picture story chronicles their challenges in building a custom cooling solution for the competition.