Gigabyte "Beat Me If You Dare"

[PeterStoba]

Gigabyte have started a graphics card overclocking competition with a rather nice prize.

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[VonBlade]

<rant>

Jeez these things **** me off. Why bother giving out cash to people who can benchmark the highest? i.e people who've already spent a ton of cash on their machine. Or at least blagged sufficient sponsorship from companies.

Why not give out prizes to those of us who's PCs are steam powered, who's hamsters are on their last legs.

The winner will always be some nutjob with a 975 on LN2 or something. You know, someone who really needs a little extra cash.

</rant>

Yeah it's better than nothing but....

[mrapoc]

Originally Posted by name='VonBlade'

<rant>

Jeez these things **** me off. Why bother giving out cash to people who can benchmark the highest? i.e people who've already spent a ton of cash on their machine. Or at least blagged sufficient sponsorship from companies.

Why not give out prizes to those of us who's PCs are steam powered, who's hamsters are on their last legs.

The winner will always be some nutjob with a 975 on LN2 or something. You know, someone who really needs a little extra cash.

</rant>

Yeah it's better than nothing but....

i agree

should be like the oc3d one where the person with the largest percentage overclock at least (but that still gets tipped by those with access to ln2)

oh well

[D-Cyph3r]

Originally Posted by name='VonBlade'

<rant>

Jeez these things **** me off. Why bother giving out cash to people who can benchmark the highest? i.e people who've already spent a ton of cash on their machine. Or at least blagged sufficient sponsorship from companies.

Why not give out prizes to those of us who's PCs are steam powered, who's hamsters are on their last legs.

The winner will always be some nutjob with a 975 on LN2 or something. You know, someone who really needs a little extra cash.

</rant>

Yeah it's better than nothing but....

Because these kinds of competitions are aimed at exactly those people. There are literally thousands and thousands of hardcore overclockers from all over the world, it's not as if a small handful of uber rich elitists stroll in and make everyone else look bad. Just like any form of sport you have to spend months/years practising to get to the top and yes, while the hardware these top guys get is very often given to them, thats to be expected after the thousands of hours they've spent in front of a monitor looking as BIOS menus and setting up crazy cooling solutions to get that extra couple of mhz out of a CPU or GPU.

This isn't like some sunday pub snooker tournament, this is professional competition and your not gonna stand a chance unless you've put the time, money and effort in to hang with the top guns.

[VonBlade]

In which case why are the 2nd and 3rd place prizes something that the winners are guaranteed to have? Makes the whole exercise pointless.

Plus it's not like clocking a graphics card is a freaking art like CPU and total system oc'ing. Keep upping the volts and the speed until it stops. Done.

[w3bbo]

Overclocking on air only perhaps. That way everyone has an even playing field (unless of course you stick an aircon right night to the intake fan lol).

[Jeddy]

Thing is money still matters in that, perhaps even more so.

Golden chips/low vid's on air make more of a difference than on chilled water/dice/l2n.

So people with money can simply order up 10 i7 975's or 10 gtx260's and pick the best, then vmod it.

[D-Cyph3r]

Originally Posted by name='VonBlade'

In which case why are the 2nd and 3rd place prizes something that the winners are guaranteed to have? Makes the whole exercise pointless.

Competition buddy. The money is only a bonus to these guys, the victory for them is beating the other guys in the room. If you go to xtremesystems you'll see these boys thrive on one-upmanship, setting new goals and records for each other to beat.

Originally Posted by name='VonBlade'

Plus it's not like clocking a graphics card is a freaking art like CPU and total system oc'ing. Keep upping the volts and the speed until it stops. Done.

Vmodding a GPU is much harder than simply adding voltage in BIOS like a CPU, as is insulating creating the pots necessary for such wildly different PCB's. You go try breaking some 3DMark records then come back and tell us how hard it was.

[VonBlade]

The likelyhood of my 939 X2 breaking any record at all is pretty slim. So I wont bother :P

And if they only do it on the one-upmanship then give the money to the people who get the best results from the least hardware or something.

I know, but you'll never convince me this is anything but making the rich, richer. Basic business sense is that customers with a little will gain a lot from a small gesture and obtain greater brand loyalty. Give me 50k and I'll sell you my wife, give Bill Gates 50k and he'd prop up a door. Extreme example but hopefully my point is made.

Anyway, as I'm so immovable upon this point I shall retire gracefully to save a thread clean