Event Coverage

HardwareZone Iron Tech 2008: Philippines Semi-Finals Round

By Vijay Anand - 18 Sep 2008

The Setup/Tweaking Challenge - Phase 2

The Setup/Tweaking Challenge - Phase 2

In the second phase, the competitors were given an hour to install the Vista operating system, the necessary drivers and utilities that they would need for their system tweaking and most importantly, to complete their overclocking trials.

At the end of one hour, whatever tweaked/overclocked settings they've last achieved and verified will then have to be used to go ahead with the last phase, the competition benchmarks. With hundreds of possible tweaking combinations from BIOS settings, to Windows tweaks, to overvclocking settings, there's a lot to juggle in this short space of time and contestants were pushed to the limits of their capabilities and skills to get a stable and powerful system running at its best capacity.

Provided for each contestant were the following drivers and utilities:

  • Intel INF drivers, version 9.0.0.1008
  • NVIDIA ForceWare 177.79 drivers
  • MSI Motherboard and Graphics Bundled Driver CDs
  • DirectX 9.0c
  • CPU-Z 1.47
  • GPU-Z 0.2.7
  • SetFSB 2.1.73.0
  • MemSet 3.5
  • RivaTuner 2.10
  • PowerStrip 3.82
  • NiBiTor 4.5a
  • Core Temp 0.99.3

Again we saw our competitors hard at work on their respective systems, this time tweaking and adjusting their overclocks to their whim and fancy. You can see the intensity in their eyes, as it was a tight battle - right till the very end!
 

 Cool and calm, that's Alvin Telan. But watch the screen and you can see a mastermind at work!

 Gil Navarro faced a few hiccups like when we snapped this photo, but soon resolved them to get an overclocked but stable running system.

 Jomar Marfil was busy figuring what's the next jump to hyperspace, erm, overclock settings to gun for.

 Michelle Patelo was trying his luck by fanning his system for better mileage.

 Paul Neri was seriously focused on getting a stable but usable overclocked system as he was trying out a few trial utilities and benchmarks.

 Ronaldo Bejarin tuned in to his own tunes while busy tweaking for the best outcome.

At the end of the short but intensive system setup and tweaking session, the below table lists what the contestants managed to achieve. Do bear in mind that the contestants will have to use these settings to compete in the benchmarking segment next and they cannot tweak the settings any further. Any benchmarking failures would mean no score on that particular test. As mentioned earlier, there are hundreds of possible settings one can perform at the BIOS, hardware and software levels, but since overclocking the systems would garner the most change, we report in brief of the settings they will be using in the next phase:-

Overclocked System Settings Achieved by Contestants
Contestants CPU Overclock Level FSB x Multiplier Graphics Card Overclock Level
(Core/Mem/Shader)
Alvin Telan Intel C2D E8400 @ 4.17GHz 520.7MHz x 8.0 GeForce 9800 GT @ Stock
Gil Navarro Intel C2D E8400 @ 4.08GHz 480.8MHz x 8.5 GeForce 9800 GT @ 700/995/1800MHz
Jomar Marfil Intel C2D E8400 @ 4.01GHz 445.0MHz x 9.0 GeForce 9800 GT @ Stock
Michelle Patelo Intel C2D E8400 @ 4.11GHz 547.7MHz x 7.5 GeForce 9800 GT @ 710/1050/1775MHz
Paul Vincent Neri Intel C2D E8400 @ 3.91GHz 434.9MHz x 9.0 GeForce 9800 GT @ Stock
Ronaldo Bejarin Intel C2D E8400 @ 4.06GHz 451.9MHz x 9.0 GeForce 9800 GT @ 701/1001/1752MHz

For the contestants who've yet to enter battle in the other countries, don't worry memorizing these figures as your hardware would differ and your mileage in your competition would greatly vary.

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