GOOC 2009 Kicks Off – 13 Overclockers Face Off

Hardware Pre-Setup

When doing extreme overclocking, insulation is the name of the game and it seems every overclocker had their own idea as to what is best. Some overclockers brought their own motherboard stands like Jody ‘3oh6’ Bailey from Canada pictured above. 3oh6 is 29 years old and the only overclocker here from Canada. He got here by being ranked 1st in Canada on hwbot.org in not one, but five hardware configurations.

Pictured above is Ross ‘Ross’ Lapkoff, who was hard at work using insulation tape to keep his board operating properly when using LN2. Ross is the GO OC 2008 U.S. Regional Champion and is 38 years old. Ross looked to have pre-cut neoprene to fit the exact motherboard being used for the championship, so he was seen here peeling pieces off wax paper to place on the new motherboard.

Chris ‘Gomeler’ Morrell was seen using the insulation process that he wrote about right here at Legit Reviews last month at GOOC 2009, which proves he actually does what he preaches. The Klean Klay that he uses is a plasticine based modeling clay, which is non-conductive, easily pliable, and doesn’t bond to the motherboard. Gomeler is 23 years old and ranked 7th overall in the United States on hwbot.org

It’s been a long time since I have seen a submerged system, but this extreme overclocker submerged his system not to keep it cool, but to keep the solid state capacitors from getting too cold and not working correctly. Michael Graf, 37, goes by the name mikeguava and was the only one practicing submersion at the event.

Check out the video clip above to hear more about this submerged system!

It was also interesting to see that one overclocker brought a water cooling setup for the processor and fired up the system to see what scores could be had before extreme cooling was added. If you blow something up and have to change something you need to thaw it out quickly, so that is why you see a propane tank in the picture above. The system pictured above belongs to Vachira ‘TiTON’ Khowdee, 34, who got here by being Tom’s Hardware Overdrive US Regional Champion, Tom’s Hardware Overdrive World Champion and winning the Forum Wars Power of 3 award (Fastest Team in the Competition).

Some people came to the show with custom made pots and others with ones that didn’t quite fit properly and needed some extra finesse to get them to work properly. A couple of metal plates, a ton of insulating material and two big fat C-Clamps usually will work in pace of four bolts and nuts as you can see from the picture above. Just don’t move the video card from side to side as that setup must weigh a ton. If you are wondering who uses C-Clamps for overclocking, it would be no other than Jeremiah ‘MIAHALLEN’ Allen, 29, who recently won Toms Hardware Guide “Overdrive” North America and World Champions (Team IRONMODS).

By the time the two hour window for was coming to a close for hardware pre-setup, the overclockers took perfectly-looking brand new motherboards out of the box and managed to have them all gooped up. Many overclockers used putty to insulate around both the CPU socket and the PCIe x16 socket and then topped it off with Vaseline or other greases!

The video above shows an overclocker using Vaseline, a brand of petroleum jelly based products, to insulate around a video card GPU to protect it from ice buildup. Not the prettiest job, but hey someone has to do it.

If insulating the systems wasn’t time consuming enough overclockers were allowed to do hardware modifications to the video cards, so out came the soldering irons and the room filled with the smell of new hardware and solder very quickly.

The first contest is Super Pi, so it will be interesting to see how the overclockers do.