Gigabyte hosts an overclocking competition for Intel CPUs

Dec 22, 2012 08:56 GMT  ·  By

December is a time for holidays, and there are various ways to celebrate them. Gigabyte, for example, feels that an overclocking competition is just what the doctor ordered, so that is what it has set up.

Between December 21, 2012 (yesterday) and January 20, 2013, Gigabyte will run the “Winter OC Whiteout” contest.

Open to all overclockers using an Intel processor and a Gigabyte motherboard, there are three stages that must be followed.

The first stage is the 3DMark11 “No X79.” Computers will need to have a motherboard featuring a single Intel non-X79 CPU, as well as a single graphics processing unit.

The second stage, 3DMark Vantage “Dual core,” will run said benchmark test on a PC using a motherboard, a single- or dual-core CPU, plus a graphics processing unit.

Finally, the third stage, Heaven DX11 “Full Out,” places no restrictions on the CPU that is used, although the GPU limit is still one.

There is a bonus stage too, of sorts. On January 10, the ten most festive and “snowy” submission photos will be added to the GIGABYTE Motherboard Tech Column Facebook page.

That means that the photos will need to be shot when the LN2 (liquid nitrogen) cooling setup is making the most Steam.

The Bonus winner will get a special prize, namely the GIGABYTE Z77-HD4 motherboard plus a Cooler Master Sirus S-5.1 gaming headset.

Speaking of prizes, each stage winner will get a GIGABYTE Z77X-UD4H motherboard and a Cooler Master Seidon 120M liquid cooling kit.

The contest page, which can be found here, has all the rules and details on the competition.

There may or may not be new world records set during this competition. Either way, the overclockers will probably use this occasion as a warm up for when Intel's Haswell CPUs and their better clock tweaking capabilities debut next year.