HardwareZone Iron Tech 2008: Singapore Semi-Finals

Introduction

Hardware Zone Iron Tech 2008. A competition filled with excitement, frustration, and accomplishment, had reached its final leg on the 12th of October. But before we proceed onwards and reveal who the Iron Tech 2008 Champion is, we relive the intense competition as experienced by our Singaporean contestants during the Singapore semi-finals, held at Funan DigitaLife Mall on the 11th of October 2008.

Similar to the earlier regional semi-finals held at Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines and Malaysia, the Singapore leg will be a test of the contestants' familiarity in building a rig from scratch and their overclocking knowledge to give the optimal performance for their PC with little to no compromise on its stability at a very limited time frame. Achieving this is no mean feat, as the competition will push their rigs to the limit with a series of benchmark tests that will either bestow glory and recognition as an overclocking guru, or crash and burn and leave the contestants trailing in the dust. Without further ado, let's present the Singapore semi-finalists, in no order of merit:

• Tianyi (aka cty85), Student
• Ng Soon Aik (aka Soon__), Student
• Tim Marshall (aka T_M (Team.AU)), Regional Project Controller
• Randy Hong (aka ravener), Student
• Jeremy Chew (aka zhouwee84), Computer Salesman
• Jeremiah Ong (aka NightRaven), Professional Overclocker

With the kind sponsorship of Micro-Star International and supporting partners of the Iron Tech 2008 competition, each contestant will be given the exact same components to work and tweak with, as listed here:

• Core 2 Quad Q9400 (2.66GHz, 6MB L2)
• MSI P45 Platinum
• 2GB Kingston HyperX KHX8500D2K2 (DDR2-1066)
• MSI N9800GT T2D512E-OC
• Hitachi Deskstar 250GB SATA HDD
• LG 22x SATA DVD-RW Drive
• Thermaltake ModX 120mm case fan
• Corsair HX620W PSU
• Cyber Snipa Warboard + Stinger Mouse
• Philips 190CW 19" widescreen LCD
• Microsoft Windows Vista

This is where the competition heats up for the competitors. Whilst our semi-finalists gained the honor of participating in Iron Tech 2008 Semi-Finals round with their submitted benchmark scores based on performance improvement metrics, they had the luxury of working with familiar components that's in their system. However in the Semi-Finals competition, with no knowledge of the components they'll be working with, this will be a test on the contestants' ability to adapt, calculate and adjust their settings to achieve stellar results.

Segmented into three phases, the initial phase requires contestants to build their rig right from the ground up, with the fastest fingers gaining an initial advantage over everyone with bonus points that'll contribute to the overall score. In the second phase, each contestant will be required to install Microsoft Windows Vista, drivers and utilities. Following which, they'll be embark on their overclocking and tweaking of their systems. Similarly, he who is speedy, will be rewarded with more bonus points. The third and final phase is where all the action is, where contestants will no longer be able to tweak their systems and subject their rig to a series of benchmark tests, with scores from each test contributing to their final results. With the introductions done and made, let's move on to Phase 1, the Rigging Challenge!

The Rigging Challenge - Phase 1

In the Rigging Challenge, contestants will be pitting themselves against each other in a competition of speed. Given a standard set of components, each contestant will be building their rig and timed from the moment they start un-boxing the components, to a successful power-on self-test, or more commonly known as POST. Amidst the flurry of the unpacking, boxes flying off the tables onto the floors, and getting themselves organized, we had a clear winner with Jeremiah Ong (aka NightRaven), gaining a lead with his 5 minutes and 36 seconds timing. In less than a minute, Chen Tianyi caught up with Jeremiah Ong at a timing of 6 minutes and 22 seconds, followed by Tim Marshall who finished at 7 minutes 11 seconds. The three of them bagged the bonus points while the rest had to make do with none in accordance with the rules of the competition.

The Sandbox Mode Challenge - Phase 2

With a term known as "The Sandbox Mode", it would be easy to guess what this challenge will be all about. But let us put it into a clearer perspective for everyone to understand what the challenge entails. Our contestants are now given a span of one hour to install and tweak their systems to their liking. They'll be given a Microsoft x86 (32-bit) Windows Vista installation disc, which allows them to install a myriad of editions such as Home Basic or even Ultimate as to their requirements. This will also be a crucial time for the contestants as they'll be diving deep into their systems and tweaking their CPU clock speeds and voltages, thus pushing their rigs to the limit, ultimately hoping they'll achieve the best benchmark scores in our third and final phase, the Benchmark Challenge.

An hour of installation, tweaking and some basic benchmarking tests to ensure their systems are running fine and dandy makes the competition a truly close one. But close as it may be, the contestants rose to the occasion and managed to get their systems all ready just slightly beyond the one hour mark, more so to be careful and to prevent their systems from crashing and burning during our stringent benchmark tests. Jeremiah Ong came very close to the 1 hour mark at a timing of 59 minutes and 19 seconds, and still emerged as the first contestant to be fully confident of his rig and leaving it in the hands of the marshals. Randy Hong broke through the one hour mark slightly, at 1 hour and 55 seconds, just a minute ahead of Jeremiah Ong. Third placing for the Sandbox Mode Challenge went to Ng Soon Aik, who clocked in at 1 hour 4 minutes and 6 seconds. At the end of the grueling one hour, each contestant presented their final overclocked settings as illustrated below:

The Benchmark Challenge - Phase 3

In the third and final phase, each rig was subjected to PCMark 05, which was made known to the contestants before the competition began. Within this phase, contestants were given two tries for each benchmark, and failure for both benchmarks would render a zero score for the specific benchmark. With a lot riding on a successful run, our contestants were giving it all they can and hoped for the best. What really got their noggins cooking though, was the surprise benchmarks that came and, you guessed it, surprised them as the emcee announces the following benchmarks to be conducted:

• AquaMark3 (default settings)
• Media Encoding (using a 1GB *.VOB file)
• Furmark

Once the announcement was made, contestants made their way back to their respective stations. This is where the fun really starts. With all the overclocking and tweaking in place, contestants will now be hands off their systems, handing over to the marshals for the day to conduct the stringent series of benchmark tests. Hopes were running high for each contestant as they watched with anticipation (and for some, disappointment) at the final scores of each benchmark, as listed below: 

It was a close fight between both Jeremiah Ong and Chen Tianyi during the Benchmark Challenge, and there was a high level of excitement as each contestant watched and viewed each other's benchmarks intently as they went through the testing phases. This was further hyped up as Jeremiah Ong's system failed the first PCMark 05 test, but he made a quick comeback with a system reboot and managed to achieve an impressive score of 10497.

Results Tabulation and Winners

The third phase, as you might have surmised, was a really close fight, and with the results out, it was a tie between both Jeremiah Ong and Chen Tianyi in the benchmarking challenge. However, this was where the bonus points from the first two phases gave Jeremiah an edge.

Thus it was evident: the winner for the Singapore semi-finals was none other than Jeremiah Ong, or known as NightRaven in our forums. For his ingenuity and overclocking expertise, Jeremiah won the following prizes:

• MSI P35 Diamond motherboard
• MSI N9600GT-T2D512 graphics card
• Kingston KHX14400D3K2/2GX, 2GB DDR3-1800 Intel XMP Certified Memory Kit
• 1 x Dicota Bacpac Rain
• 1 x HWM 1 year subscription
• 1 x GAXU 1 year subscription

Chen Tianyi came in at a close second and thus qualifies as a finalist for the Hardware Zone Iron Tech 2008 Grand Finals too, and is equally well-rewarded with a bunch of goodies which includes the following:

• MSI P35 Neo2-FR motherboard
• MSI N9600GT-T2D512 graphics card
• Kingston KHX9200D2K2/2G, 2GB DDR2-1150 Memory Kit
• 1 x Dicota Bacpac Rain
• 1 x HWM 1 year subscription
• 1 x GAXU 1 year subscription

And that's where we end off with our series of semi-finals for the inaugural Hardware Zone Iron Tech 2008 competition. We'll be following up and concluding this exciting competition with our Grand Finals coverage, so stay tuned for it!

 

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