Event Coverage

HardwareZone Iron Tech 2008 - The Grand Finale!

By Vincent Chang - 15 Oct 2008

Passing the Benchmarks

Passing the Benchmarks

After the tweaking and setup phase, the fate of our contestants were sealed. They were not allowed to adjust anything else on their systems and the marshals would now take over control for the next phase and run the competition benchmarks.

The standard benchmarks to be used for the final included a general system performance benchmark PCMark05, Super PI, a processor intensive benchmark and a video encoding test. Two other surprise benchmarks were announced on the day and the two were 3DMark06 and Devil May Cry 4 Demo.

All the marshals were instructed to install and run the benchmarks, while the contestants were allowed to witness at the side. Like before, the systems were ranked from the highest score or the fastest time to complete, depending on the benchmark and allocated points accordingly. In this case, the top position came with 20 points and the last position, 2 points. The total points from these benchmarks were then used to calculate the performance to price ratio which will be the actual result taken. In terms of the overall ranking, this segment will contribute 50% of the final score, the largest proportion of the Iron Tech competition.
 

 The standard and first benchmark for this phase is PCMark05, a popular general system benchmark.

 A favorite among enthusiasts, Super PI attempts to calculate the number of digits of pi after the decimal point. For the competition, the systems were asked to calculate up to 1 million digits.

 A test of a system's stability, this video encoding test took a raw video file and converted it into a smaller, DivX file.

 Another common benchmark tool for graphics, 3DMark06 was one of the surprise tests for this segment and surprisingly, quite a number of systems failed to make the mark.

 The last surprise test was another graphics benchmark, Devil May Cry 4 Demo benchmark, which like 3DMark06, saw many causalities among the competitors.

 One of the many 3DMark06 failures during the benchmark testing phase.

 Iron Tech was also treated to a rare sight, a red screen of death! This happened to Coolice's system (Ng Teng Liang) when his graphics card crashed during a benchmark.

 Rangsee Triwongyoi's relief was evident on passing a benchmark successfully.

There was lots of drama in this phase, with contestants anxiously hoping that their systems would pass the benchmarks. Nevertheless, not all their prayers were answered, especially in the two surprise tests, 3DMark06 and Devil May Cry 4, which garnered the most system crashes. Contestants were allowed another benchmark run after a reboot in the event of a system crash but that was all they were given. It was truly a grueling test of their system stability and performance.

At the end of the day, two competitors, Jeremiah Ong from Singapore and Indonesia's Alva Jonathan emerged as joint winners of this segment, with identical performance to price ratios. They were both awarded the full 100 points from this phase. Thailand's Rangsee Traiwongyoi finished third, slightly edging out Rekky from Indonesia.

Looking through the results, it was clear that these four top scorers had systems that finished all the benchmarks safely without crashing. The rest had at least one failure. Stability is the name of the game here and these four gentlemen showed that they got that spot-on.

 

Competition Benchmark Results
Contestants PCMark05 Results Super PI Results (smaller is better) Video Encoding (shorter is better) 3DMark06 Devil May Cry 4 Total Points (Benchmarks)
Ng Teng Liang 10856 11.700s 3 mins 48 secs Did not finish Did not finish 36
Alex Tan 10631 11.637s 4 mins 11 secs Did not finish Did not finish 32
Alva Jonathan 13408 11.451s 3 mins 39 secs 18613 120.77 90
Rekky 12074 14.383s 4 mins 28 secs 17322 124.64 56
Thirdsak Phokha 10696 11.169s 3 mins 46 secs Did not finish Did not finish 46
Rangsee Triwongyoi 10579 11.638s 3 mins 55 secs 18236 120.96 62
Ronaldo Bejarin 11677 14.056s Did not finish Did not finish Did not finish 20
Gil Navarro Did not finish 13.500s 4 mins 17 secs Did not finish Did not finish 14
Chen Tianyi 10486 13.369s 4 mins 17 secs Did not finish Did not finish 20
Jeremiah Ong 11161 11.466s 3 mins 45 secs 19068 128.20 88

 

 


Calculating the Performance/Price Ratio
Contestants Total Points (Benchmarks) Cost of Rig Performance to Price Ratio Final Points Awarded
Ng Teng Liang 36 US$1363 0.026 50
Alex Tan 32 US$1375 0.023 40
Alva Jonathan 90 US$1403 0.064 100
Rekky 56 US$1323 0.042 70
Thirdsak Phokha 46 US$1385 0.033 60
Rangsee Triwongyoi 62 US$1403 0.044 80
Ronaldo Bejarin 20 US$1305 0.015 20
Gil Navarro 14 US$1325 0.011 10
Chen Tianyi 20 US$1265 0.016 30
Jeremiah Ong 88 US$1385 0.064 100
Join HWZ's Telegram channel here and catch all the latest tech news!
Our articles may contain affiliate links. If you buy through these links, we may earn a small commission.