The winner will be selected at random and the giveaway will run until Friday, April 30th. To win, all you have to do is follow these simple steps:

Step 1: Go to Twitter.com, and if you don’t have an account yet, make one. If you do, step one is already done for you!

Step 2: Go to the TechREACTION Twitter page and the Thermalright Twitter page and follow both of us.

Step 3: Once you are following both TR and Thermalright we’d like you to make a tweet that says “I stay cool with @thermalright and @TechREACTION”.

FINAL STEP: Post a link to your tweet in this thread. The winner will only be selected from THIS THREAD and will be verified of course, so no cheating!

There will be two prizes, with two chances to win.  The prizes will be two Thermalright Ultra 120 Extreme (rev. C) CPU Coolers, courtesy of Thermalright.

]]> http://www.techreaction.net/2010/04/15/the-techreaction-net-thermalright-twitter-giveaway/feed/ 2 http://www.techreaction.net/2010/04/01/techreaction-net-blog-win-thermalright-april-giveaway/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=techreaction-net-blog-win-thermalright-april-giveaway http://www.techreaction.net/2010/04/01/techreaction-net-blog-win-thermalright-april-giveaway/#comments Thu, 01 Apr 2010 18:46:16 +0000 EnJoY http://www.techreaction.net/?p=5883 All registered Bloggers have the chance to win free hardware at least once a month forever!

That’s right! FREE HARDWARE! Just for being a registered and active blogger of TechREACTION.net.

How do I sign up? Simple, first register at this page to become a TR blogger. Once you receive your account information, half the job is done.

Second, go to the TechREACTION forums and register there as well. You must be registered in both places to be eligible.

Bloggers are given special access to a private forum where they can discuss content and blogs, as well as be notified of available review samples and other perks.

What about the giveaway? It’s easy. All you have to do is be yourself; a technology enthusiast. To qualify you must follow these simple rules:

- One blog post equals one submission to the contest.
- Two blog posts equals two submissions, and so on, and so forth.
- In cases where there are multiple prizes, a single blogger will only be able to win one. Prizes are drawn at random.

I have never blogged before, what’s the deal? Don’t think of it as something only for the elite. Blogging is really no different from posting on a forum, such as this. The difference being that it’s more organized, looks more professional to the reader, and puts the information on the front page rather than just buried deep in some thread somewhere.

Many average Joe’s who simply starting out with some basic blogging are now writing doing full fledged reviews and making a solid name for themselves, and you can too.

I’m interested, but what can I blog about? Everything, as long as it’s technology related. Here are some examples:

Just did some benching with a few buddies or by yourself? Blog it.
Bought a new smart phone or mobile device that you can review? Blog it.
Testing out the new version of an operating system? Blog it.
Seeing what better cooling does for your CPU overclock? Blog it.

The list goes on and virtually anything can be blogged as long as it’s related to the main subject: Technology.

Giveaways occur once a month, so by registered for this months giveaway you are in fact registering for every giveaway from here on to infinity. Sounds easy enough no?

Thermalright Ultra Extreme 120 (Rev.C) & 2x TRAD 2 GTX

Sponsored By Thermalright

Previous Contest Prizes & Winners:

March Prize: EVGA P55 Motherboard
Winning Bloggers: carpo93

February Prize: Crucial Ballistix Tracer DDR3 Kit & OCZ Gladiator CPU Cooler
Winning Bloggers: 0Ro!, The Duke

December Prize: Corsair HX750W & Razer Lachesis Gaming Mouse
Winning Bloggers: The Duke, Archer

November Prize: Gigabyte P55-UD4P Core i5/i7 Motherboard
Winning Bloggers: thebanik

October Prize: 2x AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition
Winning Bloggers: mav2000, Neuromancer

Congratulations to you!

EVGA P55 Motherboard

The Winner of the March Blogger Giveaway is carpo93!

Congratulations to carpo93, and thank you to EVGA for sponsoring.  Stay tuned for April’s giveaway announcement later on today.

(UPDATED: Bryan was very tired when he did this interview with me and made a mistake in mentioning that the GeForce did not contain hardware functionality for Double-Precision.  What he meant to say was that the GeForce does not use ECC, where-as the Tesla parts do)

TechREACTION.net: What are your thoughts on the delays that Fermi was plagued with?

Bryan Del Rizzo: I mean, this is a chip that was designed from the ground up for DX11.  It wasn’t an after thought, we didn’t take our old architecture and just tack on DX11 and then just, you know, bring it to market.  This is a completely new design, a completely new architecture.  It took us longer to get it to market than we expected, we would have liked to have it to market when Windows 7 shipped back in October.  But we weren’t able to do that, so we were late, and we admit that.  But sometimes the wait is worth it.

TechREACTION.net: Were the causes of these delays things that you anticipated internally given the immensity of the architecture?

So, yes and no.  When you’re talking this complex a level of silicon, you never really know.  You can design everything on paper first, and then you really have to wait for the silicon to come back. You have to test it, you have to make sure it validates and it’s working the way you think it is.  If it’s not, you have to go back, you have to make some tweaks to the silicon, and that just takes time right?  So I mean, it’s just a matter of doing business.  You generally never go to production with the first rev of the silicon anyway, if you do, you are awfully lucky.  It is what it is right? We’re not looking back, we’re looking forward.

TechREACTION.net: Given the presentation today, it’s pretty clear that you guys are putting a strong focus on gaming.  But originally, before the product was officially launched, people were talking about how the GPU was really geared towards Tesla environments.

Bryan Del Rizzo: Yea, it’s funny because, we had a show last year called the GTC (GPU Tech Conference), and so we launched the Fermi architecture, which we think of Fermi as the foundation for all of our chips, right?  The issue is though, you can have Fermi-based chips in a bunch of different markets.  You can have them in Tesla which is HPC (High Performance Computing), servers and things like that.  You can have them in Quadro, which is content design, and GeForce, which is consumer based right?  So we have this GTC, which is primarily an HPC conference, with engineers, designers, developers and guys doing cool stuff with GPU’s, but it’s not gaming centered.  So people came to GTC or they looked at the presentations for GTC, and they said “Well, what the crap?  Nvidia’s leaving the gaming market?”  Haha, no!  It wasn’t a gaming conference, it was an HPC conference.  So people didn’t grasp that, they need to understand that we’re doing all of this great stuff, and a chip can have many forms and functions, it can have many flavors.  For some reason a lot of people didn’t seem to get that.

TechREACTION.net: So they figured it just had one thing it was geared toward and that was it?

Bryan Del Rizzo: Yea, and the chip we’re designing for GeForce is dramatically different than the chip we’re designing for Tesla.

TechREACTION.net: In what ways?

Bryan Del Rizzo: Just in terms of the capability, functionality, things like that.  And the usage model for what you’re doing with GeForce is not the same as what you’re doing with HPC.

TechREACTION.net: So there are hardware differences between GeForce and Tesla then?

Bryan Del Rizzo: Of course, the easiest one is double precision.  There aren’t any games, there aren’t any user applications today that use double precision.  But in the medical markets, in the HPC field, that’s dramatically important to them.  So we’re not going waste the time and waste silicon space, and all that kind of stuff, providing a feature to gamers and incurring a cost for them, that they don’t need or possibly want.

(UPDATE: Bryan was very tired when he did this interview with me and made a mistake in mentioning that the GeForce did not contain hardware functionality for Double-Precision.  What he meant to say was that the GeForce does not use ECC, where-as the Tesla parts do)

TechREACTION.net: Some news sources have suggested that there are more Fermi-based GPU’s due sometime in June / early Summer. Is there any credibility to that?

Bryan Del Rizzo: Well, actually there probably is because I think one of our executives in the financial offices said that you can expect other variants of the GeForce family sometime in the second half of this year.  So, based on what they said that probably is true.

TechREACTION.net: Can you give any insight into if these would be mainstream parts, or another high-end refresh?

Bryan Del Rizzo: It could be all, or any of the above.  Certainly if you are looking at what Nvidia brings to market, they have a top to bottom product company right?  Clearly the GTX 480, 470 fit into a higher end of the market, a higher end of the enthusiast class.  So you can figure that we’re going to have some more mainstream products with that, and you can figure that we can probably fit some cool stuff on top of that as well.  So, expect the unexpected.

TechREACTION.net: Previously you’ve had dual GPU cards such as the GTX 295.  Do you have any plans to do the same thing with the GTX 480 GPU?

Bryan Del Rizzo: So we can’t comment on that today, we haven’t announced any product.  But I have to kind of laugh because when we launched the GeForce GTX 285, there were a lot of rumors that said we couldn’t do a dual GPU product with that chip.  They said it was architecturally impossible, it was too power hungry, it would just be impossible to do.  And of course we brought the GTX 295 to market; it did really well!  (laughs)  So, if you look at the history of Nvidia, you can probably pretty much figure out what we’re going to do, but I can’t give you a confirmation on that today.

TechREACTION.net:  The other day, SemiAccurate, another technology blog, reported that Nvidia was forcing resellers to purchase 80 pieces of your GT2XX series cards in order to get GTX 400 series cards.  I have to ask, is there any truth to this that you are aware of?

Bryan Del Rizzo: If you look at the accuracy of that site, I think there’s a reason why it’s called SemiAccurate. Actually, I’d probably say it’s really “not accurate”.  Given the immense fabrication of stories on that site, you know, it is what it is.  Let me say this, if you go to Google and you search for Nvidia stories, stories from that site come up as either satire or parody.  So, I’ll leave it at that.

TechREACTION.net:  Ok, fair enough, thanks.

Moving on…  No specs were given in regards to the TDP during the launch event, and the official reviews are just going live now.  The rumors currently standing say that the GTX 480 is sitting at 250w TDP, is this accurate?

Bryan Del Rizzo: Yes, based on the press kits that we give out, for the GTX 480 it is 250, and I think for the 470…I need to double check, but I think it’s 215 or something like that.  So it’s slightly higher than what the GTX 285’s or 295’s were.

TechREACTION.net:  Did you guys have to do anything exotic with the cooling solutions in order to get them to run with stability?

Bryan Del Rizzo: Yea, I mean, it’s a bigger chip…it’s 3 billion transistors, so you gotta be crafty in terms of how you keep things running and cooling.  It’s a 4 heat pipe design on the GTX 480, the 470 is smaller so you’ve got to keep that in consideration.  But, you also have to build yourself a great case around it, right?  There’s a lot of great chassis, from companies like Thermaltake, there’s builders like Main Gear, I mean if you’re building these great high performance PC’s, it’s standard cooling, standard air flow, standard stuff that you have to do.  So it’s not like it’s radically different. I think some people are trying to make a big deal of it, but I think as an enthusiast you’re probably less concerned about that than you are about performance.  If you want balls to the wall performance, it’s a slight trade-off right?  It’s slightly more heat, for awesome features, but basically just awesome performance, so take your pick.  And if you don’t want that, and you don’t want the 480, then you can sit down with the 470, and that just comes down to user preference and stuff like that.

TechREACTION.net: What would you say is the GTX 4 series greatest performance feature in regards to gaming?

Bryan Del Rizzo: Tough question because I don’t know if you’re talking about gaming today or gaming in the future.  Clearly we built the chip on DX11 tesselation, we have 16 tesselation engines that are scalable.  So basically what that really means, the more tesselation in the game, the more performance you get out of the GPU.  Versus say, the competitor products on the market today; they have a single tesselation unit.  So what that means is if you have various degrees of tesselation, the tesselation performance stays flat.  It doesn’t matter what GPU you have from them, you’re just gonna get the same level of tesselation performance.  Which really doesn’t do much for the developer, developing a game.  Developers, well…they wanna crank shit up right?  I mean, that’s the whole point of having a scalable architecture.  So I think for me, tesselation is killer, it’s key to next generation titles, but they need the performance under the hood to drive that.

TechREACTION.net: So you think, for future titles especially, that tesselation is going to be a huge feature?

Bryan Del Rizzo: Yea, because I mean, the DX11 titles on the market today don’t really take advantage of tesselation to a great degree.  I mean, they claim DX11 support, but until the developers have an architecture where they can actually harness the power, and really play around with tesselation levels, I think this is what GTX 480 does.  When you combine things like that with things that we’re doing with ray-tracing, things like 3D Vision Surround, or just even 3D Vision.  Our goal here is to change the level of the experience that you get.  It’s not too much about running a benchmark, it’s about how you experience the game, how you immerse yourself in the game, how you feel in the game right?  Everything we’re building has that objective in mind, and I think that’s what we’re delivering.

TechREACTION.net:  From a marketing perspective, would you say that 3D Vision is the most promising feature for you from a marketing perspective?

Bryan Del Rizzo: Well, 3D is hot.  We’ve been shipping 3D Vision for about a year now.  And the cool thing that we do with GeForce, for developers, they almost really don’t have to do any work for 3D because we can do all of the graphic work ourselves in the GeForce graphics driver.  So, all we’re really doing is intercepting the signal to the game, and instead of rendering it once, we’re actually rendering it twice, once to the left eye and once to the right eye, and then it syncs up and comes out as 3D.  So from that perspective developers don’t actually have a lot of work.  What happened last year though is that they finally got a hold of our technology, they started playing with it and they said “Holy shit, this stuff looks great!”.  It’s the first time that they’d seen a compelling 3D stereoscopic solution on the PC.  People think of 3D, and they have this in their mindset, back in their head, they think of the red and blue paper glasses right?  And everybody thinks that looks like shit.  And it does, right?  And that’s the experience people are used to, so until they actually try it…  You know, the one thing I can say is that it’s really hard to articulate and talk about it, you really have to see it.

TechREACTION.net:  You do.  We saw it today and it was extremely impressive.

Bryan Del Rizzo: It is.  So we do all the real-time conversion ourselves in our driver, but developers like THQ and Blizzard and the folks that did Batman, and just a bunch of other developers, have gone back in and enhanced and optimized there games for it.  That means they’ve fixed the depth, they rendered all of the backgrounds at the right depth level.  They’ve made things look intrinsically more interesting when you get up close.  You have the screen effect, in games like WoW, Batman and RE5, stuff will come off the screen at you as well.  That’s a completely different experience right?  So, we’re thankful that the developers like the technology, we’re thankful that they are putting those customizations into the game, because today it’s really about how does the consumer experience it.  And if you play it on 2D and then you play it on 3D, you don’t want to go back to 2D.  If you play on a single 3D screen, and then you play it on three 3D screens, you don’t want to go back to the single screen.  It’s just complete immersion, right?  It’s a whole new way to play the game.

TechREACTION.net:  So would you say that a feature like 3D Vision gives you an edge over the competition?

Bryan Del Rizzo: I’ve always thought that we’ve had the edge on our competition anyway, because we’re driving development of all of these cool technologies that developers take advantage of.  3D Vision specifically of course is one we’ve talked a lot about, ray-tracing,  and tesselation.  I mean, all of this combined just puts us head and shoulders above what our competition is doing.  So at the end of the day it’s not about running a single benchmark and saying..”well we’re faster at x percentage”, it’s about…yea we want to be the fastest GPU on the planet obviously, right?  And we are, but at the end of the day, it’s more about how our consumers are experiencing the games that they’re playing.  And as long as we can drive the development and evolution of that, then we are doing our jobs.

TechREACTION.net:  Sounds good Bryan.  Thanks so much for your time!

Keep your eyes peeled on this page, be sure to digg and retweet, and we’ll see you at PAX!

Nvidia Fermi Launch Event Updates:

6:08PM – Waiting for show to begin…fans going crazy with noise makers.

6:11PM – “Please take your seats, show will start in 1 minute”

6:13PM – Drew Henry (General Manager, GeForce GPU’s) is coming on stage to begin the event…

6:14PM – Drew is telling everyone how awesome us gamers and Bostonians are.

6:15PM -  Nvidia snuggies are confirmed for giveaway….lol

6:17Pm – Here comes the spin, discussing why Fermi was delayed.  “We wanted to make something great for gamers”.

6:19PM – Showing off Fermi.  “The GeForce GTX480…is something you are really going to be delighted with.”

6:20PM – ” It’s the most complicated GPU we have ever built.”  3 Billion transistors.

6:21PM – “And we have the GeForce GTX470..it’s little brother, also a great gaming GPU.”

6:22PM – Performance Numbers: GTX480 compared to 285, “sometimes more than 2x performance, no less than 1.5x”

6:23PM – “2x performance in overall gaming is cool, but it’s not just a GPU for gaming.”  “We’ve invested a lot in physics, to allow you to blow things up. “  “Up to 2.5x the gpu physx processing performance of the last generation”

6:24PM – “Real-time interactive ray tracing…”  Is this a Larrabee conference?

6:25PM – New Nvidia “Crank that S#it up!” t-shirts.

6:26PM – This next part is in 3D.  Now he’s talking about he feels the PC can lead the industry in 3D, with 3D VISION.

6:27PM – EA’s Gordon Van Dyke here now, showing off BF:BC2 in 3D.  Showing how they were able to incorporate 3D VISION into their latest hit.

6:28PM – Showing BC2 in Nvidia 3D Surround, that’s three screens, full 3D.  Looks VERY impressive actually.

6:29PM – Showing BC2 jungle fight scene with the militants when you hold out in the shack.  Again, very impressive, but the full surround sound is certainly adding to the effect.

6:30PM – Basically 3D Vision Surroind is 3D Vision meets ATI’s Eyefinity.

6:31PM – Going to show WoW in 3D Vision now.  Allll of the nerds are going berzerk.

6:32PM – Little LOL as the frame rates totally suck as they are in flight mode in WoW in 3D Vision Surround.  Not sure what that’s about…but they say it’s fresh support, just added, so perhaps it’s still in “beta”.

6:33PM  – Jesse Addly (?) from EA.  Does Tech Dev at EA for the PC platform.  So, engine development.  Going to talk about Need For Speed now, also in 3D Vision Surround.

6:34PM – Ooooh, going to show off real-time ray tracing, with cars in Need For Speed.  It’s in 2D, but it’s showing you interactive Ray Tracing, in what looks like a few frames under 30fps.  It’s allowing you to customize a ray traced car in game.

6:36PM – This is a downloadable app with the entire NFS Garage inside, you can customize and collect your cars, add your creations to in-game NFS.

6:37PM – Apparently this app will ship with every GTX480 and GTX470, so a bundled app, but not a full game by any means.  Interesting.

6:38PM -  “Working with the guys in the game industry is really important for us.”  “Often times what we’ll do is put together technology demonstrations to show what they can do with our technology in their game”

6:39PM  – Next up “This is what we call Super Sonic Sled”.  This is a full game they are going to include with every GeForce card.  This is the rocket sled demo everyone saw a few weeks ago.  It’s in full 3D Vision Surround.  All the latest DX11 technology and lots of tesselation.

6:40PM – Showing off different parts of the game world they created.  Showing off the rocket sled, Barney (the sled driver), the millions of pieces of the bridge that gets destroyed.  Showing the details in wire frame as well, so the viewers have an idea of the complexity.

6:42PM – They are using the chicken gun that they have implemented in the game to blow off pieces of the rocket sled, which destroys the sled as he takes off.

6:45PM – Added a million particles to the bridge and blew it up to show the capability of the GPU’s Physx processing.

6:47PM – Next up Metro 2033.  Louis Giglioti (?) from THQ to discuss.

6:48PM – “Let’s see the game…”  Metro 2033 running in full 3D Vision Surround.  Lot’s of game background talk, the author, the story, blah blah..go read the review.

6:53PM – Ok, that demo is finally over.  Just a game promo essentially.

6:53PM – “With this generation architecture, we have them in full production, full launch today, the reviews will be posted in about 10 mins. ” And they will be in stores in about 14 days.

6:54PM – Something with green nailpolish on their 3d glasses just won a GTX 480.  Now they are tossing out tosses. I just punched out some nerd to get one!  “Sucks to be you nerd”  j/k…or am I?

6:55PM -  Show is clearing out, it appears it might already be over, even though it hasn’t been officially stated yet.

6:56PM – It’s over, good night.

Be sure to check our Interview with Nvidia’s Bryan Del Rizzo here

Big Bang Fuzion

The Big Bang Fuzion and Trinergy are essentially identical boards with the only difference being their choice of logic.  Both are P55 boards with top of the line PWM and capacitors, however the Trinergy uses the older Nvidia NF200 chip for additional PCI-E lanes, where-as the Fuzion uses the new Lucid Hydra chip.  The Lucid allows the use of both an ATI and Nvidia card at the same time, as well as the standard SLI and CrossFire solutions.

Next we headed to the Asus booth for a meeting with the very wise Gary Key.  He showed us around, starting with motherboards.  Asus had the some updated products to showcase, but Gary did make a point in mentioning that very little has changed since P55 was released and probably wouldn’t for the foreseeable future.  They did however have a revised Maximus III Extreme and Rampage III Extreme.

Rampage III Extreme

Gary explained some of the new features of this revision, including a totally new and improved PWM capable of over 260amps power delivery to the CPU.  Gary said that number could increase to as high as 300a before launch.  Another nice addition was the LN2 switch, which essentially fixes the cold boot issues by forcing the board to run in a base mode that disables all unnecessary features and bumps up voltages just for the boot process.  The BIOS is still being tuned at the moment, but Gary is expecting the board to be ready for March/April.

On the AMD side, Asus had a nice surprise in the form of the M4A89GTD PRO using what will eventually become the RD890GX chipset.  Next generation on-board graphics, SB850 southbridge with native SATA6 and USB 3.0, and improved PWM.

Asus M4A89GTD PRO

Boards will be ready in time for AMD’s desktop 6-core around April/May.  The board pictured is of course not their high-end, which would explain the poor spacing around the CPU socket area.  Gary assured me that the higher-end versions would be more enthusiast friendly both in terms of component quality/features and layout.

Lastly we have the Eee Keyboard which as the name implies, is a netbook in a keyboard.  Atom processor, 8-16GB SSD, 720P wireless output that can connect to any TV instantly.  The device uses line of sight and needs to be within 5 meters of the display for the signal to come through.  The quality was impressive and the device responsive.  The size and weight of the unit made it deceiving that it could be anything more than just a regular keyboard.  Asus really has a great product in the pipe with this one.  Gary says late Q1 or early Q2 for release and MSRP starting at $449.

Eee Keyboard

]]> http://www.techreaction.net/2010/01/08/ces-2010-asus-msi-motherboards-eee-keyboard/feed/ 1 http://www.techreaction.net/2010/01/07/ces-2010-corsair-party-lavo/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=ces-2010-corsair-party-lavo http://www.techreaction.net/2010/01/07/ces-2010-corsair-party-lavo/#comments Fri, 08 Jan 2010 01:52:11 +0000 EnJoY http://www.techreaction.net/?p=3091 I arrived at the airport the afternoon of the 6th and was greeted by an explosion of lights and sounds I had never seen before.  THIS was Las Vegas!  We arrived at Planet Hollywood (Jake and I), got changed and then headed out to the Corsair Party a club called LAVO.  Corsair was kind enough to provide a full buffet with open bar, and there were several systems on display.

Corsair's new slogan... "ICE ICE BABY!"

Here were a few of the system’s on display.  This one was particularly nice.  You cannot see it but the paint job is midnight blue that looks black in low light and very blue under brighter light; very cool!

Modder's INC Custom PC

Corsair 800D + AMD Eyefinity In Action!

I figured you guys might just want to see the crowd and the layout of the place.  What you can’t see is the entire bar area and the platform where the display systems were.

Just a nice shot of myself and Jake with the Corsair party babes.  They were pretty cool girls and were hanging out with the guests the whole time.

Throughout the night Jake and I had some great chats with some of Corsair’s best.  We discussed their power supplies, upcoming and existing SSD’s, and of course their great memory products.  Corsair seems to really have their act together when it comes to all of their product lines, and they are careful not to overextend their resources and dilute the quality of any of their lines.   They were pretty tight lipped about new releases, but I can say that they seem to be on a similar path when it comes to their near future SSD road map, but I can’t get any more specific than that.

Stay tuned for more from Corsair from us in the future.  Thanks again to Robert for supporting our December Giveaway.

What hardware was used ?
Well I have to admit, that we mostly tested hardware. That’s right… the majority of hardware wasn’t pre-tested on other cooling, apart from some CPUs that were previously tested on air or singlestage phase change cooling…

CPUs: 3 x E8600, 1 x Core i7 860, 2 x Core i7 920, 6 x Core i7 950 (one of them is experiencing trouble now ’cause crio pushed him at 1.85V+ LOL), 2 x Core i7 975 EE, 1 x Gulftown 2.4GHz ES

VGAs: Some random PCI cards, 6 x 4890, 1 x 5870 (R.I.P), 1 x 6600LE, 1 x 6600GT, 1 x 7600GS, 2 x GTX280 (one of them died), 5 x GTX285, 2 x GTX295

Motherboards: 3 x Rampage Extreme, 1 x Gigabyte P55 UD6, 4 x EVGA Classified E760

Feelings: Can’t really describe what exactly we felt. It was a blast!

And now for some photos and videos.

From left to right (applies to every single photo included in this post):

sofos1990, s@39@, pastelidis.n.s., George_o/c

s@39@ always smiling!

Nerds having a good time. LOL

Each one of us filled a dewar, at least once. Was a nice experience I might say.

ROFL. I can’t pull it off. I just can’t. hehe

sofos1990 showing off his pure muscle power. Bare in mind, that’s a full 25L dewar.

Isn’t it just lovely when LN2 vaporizes?

Stelaras talking with zafiropo on the phone.

linos80 and dellman. Special thanks to these two guys, and especially to linos for organizing that great event!

zafiropo desperately trying to boot that 6.5GHz E8600. It’s a pity that his Rampage Extreme was weak and we only managed to bench @ 6GHz.

We’ve poored excessively high amounts of LN2 over these four days. It’s almost as if these are the “Days of our Lives”.

mortisboy & giorgos.th. Truly respectable overclockers. They just, never run out of patience!

Legendary bench-desk. Various great Greek overclockers benched there, during the past four days: zafiropo, benchzowner, crio, tsan, hipro5, giorgos th., crustytheclown, phil, mortisboy, TASOS!

360L consumed in approximately 60 hours. Four i7-based systems benched at the exact same time. Seems normal now huh ?

Let me think, hmmm. Yeah. That was the bench rig used by mortisboy and giorgos th. Gigabyte P55 UD6, Intel Core i7 860 overclocked at 4.6GHz, 3 x GeForce GTX285 in Tri-SLI. Max CPU 3D benchable frequency was around 4.6 – 4.65GHz.

George_o/c and giorgos th. It’s pretty visible isn’t it ? Multiply giorgos’s weight by one and a half and there you go, that’s me!

And of course, the superstar aka hipro5 aka grandpa. Rushed into the event with his Gulftown and smashed multiple records. It was an honor watching hipro benching live. He’s so calm and focused, even knowing that various cameras were pointing at him.

George (tsan) and sofos1990 benching 3DMark2001 SE – the best 3D Benchmark out there. System used ? Famous combination when aiming for Single Card World Records: Intel Core 2 Duo E8600 and ASUS Rampage Extreme, along with an EVGA GTX295.

There’s a nice photo. Mortisboy, tsan, sofos1990, giorgos th., George_o/c, Winters, junior21, Gorillakos, all together having fun!

That’s the system I benched with junior21. EVGA GTX295, Core i7 950 and EVGA Classified X58 E760. Bad thing is that we were experiencing weird motherboard problems. First day 5.3GHz SPi 32M and ~5.45GHz SPi 1M. Second day 5.15GHz AquaMark3 stable for an hour… Moments later, we couldn’t even bench AquaMark3 at 4.92GHz.

Junior21 and Seaside posing next to GoriLLakoS’s CPU pot.

George_o/c, Winters, GoriLLakoS

There you go. Another upcoming Greek overclocker, phil! If only he had his cascade with him.

Whoever is benching with liquid nitrogen has to admit that he’s doing that. I know, I know, it’s fun. And chilling of course.

Seaside’s first experience with liquid nitrogen.

Zafiropo, Stelaras, GoriLLakoS in the background. Pastelidis.n.s. doing his magic tricks in the front.

Sofos1990 is one of the greatest jinxers alive. I’m starting to lose my patience with all this bad luck. ROFL, notice how angry I am, looking at his face and forgetting all about de-freezing the pot. Just kidding.

Sofos1990 challenging EVGA Classified E760. Intriguing fight.

Want a frozen beer as fast as possible ? Use liquid nitrogen, I promise it will do the job.

Crio refilling his dewar with pure, wr crushing liquid nitrogen.

I just had to pour some more liquid nitrogen on the floor, in order to attract everyone’s attention. Some of the visitors who didn’t have the faintest idea about what was going on the event, thought that the floor was on fire!

hiprambo5 on action (again)

However, Athens Digital Week wasn’t only about overclocking. One could say, that extreme on-stage overclocking was a small drop of water in the ocean, in comparison with the rest of the event. Telecoms, robotics, music, pc gaming and case modding had huge fans and a large number of visitors as well. Unfortunately though, due to limited time, I can only post photos of the modded rigs, that were from my point of view, spectacular! I met most of the modders in person. Some of them were 12 or 13-year old boys, rushing from school back to the event so that they represent their innovating creations. If that’s not passion, then what is my friends ?

AND THE WINNER IS… linos80 with his fabulous aquarium pc

Last but not least, three videos. The second one is REALLY funny. If you’d like, I’ll translate what is said in the video… we’re mostly laughing at crustytheclown and hipro, in a friendly and polite way though

LN2 refilling – by pastelidis

crustytheclown drinks liquid nitrogen frozen wine

In this one I’m explaining the basic concept behind LN2

Hope you guys had a good read,

George

Check this topic in the forums for the full details.

I arrived mid afternoon Friday and luckily I had no hardware casualties from the trip there, I met everyone when I arrived and it was really cool to meet those that I looked up at for so long. Vince was benching a killer rig (pics being kept under my hat ) and said after they were done they would get me set up with a rig to learn LN2. When I was being taught the ins and outs from everyone I was thinking that I had the opportunity to learn using LN2 from some of the best in the business and got a kick out of that. Shamino, K|ngp|n, Gomeler, Gautam, Vapor, 3oh6, Andre Yang, and Philly Boy were on hand with a few others to bench and hang out as well. I was set up to bench LN2 at a desk and was lucky enough to learn benching the Classified under LN2 by none other than Shamino, and that was a real treat to me. I was surprised how many Classified motherboards were on hand and then had to remind myself were I was and then it seemed normal. Over the weekend I saw a lot of records set and had a lot of fun -

I took some pics and think typing at 4:42am isn’t the best for blogging and will let the pics do the rest of the talking for me – notice how nonchalant Vince is as he fills his dewars LOL

The good photos of me were taken by 3oh6 (an awesome photographer)!

-TGE

TheGoat Eater Pouring LN2 - by 3oh6

TheGoat Eater - No Look Pour | by 3oh6

gomeler working the twkr

gautam working

Vince using the torch

Vince filling dewar

Vince

Gautam and Vapor's test rig

LN2 dewar

Partial Group Pic