PICTORIAL: Gigabyte GO OC 2009 Inside out

After Tony finished up with his speech, the time was for sponsors to give out motivational speeches to the overclockers or talk a little bit about thier companies.

First came Francois Piednoel from Intel. In his typical fashion the charming Frenchman who is "guilty" for the Skulltrail platform and a lot of overclocking efforts of late -gave a short but sweet speech and wishes them all luck. If you're asking yourself why a once buttoned-up company that prohibited overclocking is now a staunch supporter, Francois is one of best examples how to change the company from the inside.

Mark Tekunoff from Kingston Technology talked about Kingston HyperX line-up and how the memory been designed for overclockers by overclockers and wished them all good luck.

James Lee of Enermax fame gave a speech about their power supplies and how they modified the PSU design to make it more OC friendly. Just like Francois, he ended up with wishing the overclockers good luck. Out of all, his company was most on the line, as a good PSU is that fine line between "overclocking yes" and "overclocking fail". This was also the reason why Enermax came out with the big guns - a 1.05KW PSU for this hardware setup should be enough for a 5 GHz clock and beyond ;)

Speeches ended up with Jack Chen, Channel Marketing Manager from nVidia Corporation, giving out a short speech about the technologies from the other giant in Santa Clara and wished all the best to the overclockers.

After the opening speeches, they all take a group photo together before the overclocking event really had begun.

Then, the overclockers begin to prep their hardware to start overclocking. You can take a note that almost every overclocker had a different approach on how to insulate the CPUs. As we all know - a single drop of water created by condensated humidity is enough to kill a motherboard and even the $1000 CPU. Thus, it came as no surprise that clockers hoped that their way was the right way for the conditions in the room, and gettign this right meaning that you're half-way done to winning the competition.

Some opeted to start off with water-cooling to begin with, and then follow up with LN2...

And here are some tools of the trade...

As you can see, there aren't any rules[other than use provided parts]... overclockers use different methods and all in all, this brings us memories about how car racing developed - the different methods resulted in wildely different resutls. Overclocking is no different - these "engines" work the same, but the way how to cool them varies greatly from overclocker to overclocker.

Continued onto the next page...