Massman

Adjusted the third option

Team.AU is to the Pro OC Cup what Sacha35 was to F1OC Thanks for saying I'm human, probably the nicest thing someone has said to me in weeks! . Yes, I can make mistakes. And yes, I will apoligise for mistakes. But the evaluation of the Pro OC Cup will not happen after only a month of the first round. The earliest evaluation point is after three rounds, so the concept is tested thoroughly and adjusted where necessary. Adjustments as suggested already: multiple eliminations, different amount of benchmarks and so on. Looking forward to see how Splave and his personal hardware pile/addication/you-need-therapy kind of benching will do in the first Cup.

Freestyle? It's weird that I actually get messages from community folks that say the Pro OC Cup is a great idea, but they don't want to reply in public as the hate directed towards them is something they don't want to deal with. You don't need to participate in the Cup at all, I don't want to force anyone anywhere.

Working in vendor means you are professionally engaged in the industry and cannot join XOC. That's very clear.

MSI has the info of the winners, prizes and so on. Updates will follow shortly. It's been less than 4 days since the competition closed, this is the normal amount of time it takes to arrange everything.

Oh, I see. Your complaint is valid.

You work for vendor, no XOC.

Not sure which would be the oldest CPU batches. Wolfdale was EOL in 2011, I think, but that just means they stop from being sold and not that they just stop from being produced.

Buy, test and report back! Afaik, the latest batches of the E8600's were really good. Back in the day, SF3D and Elmor had a couple to test and they were pretty much all 6.5G, if I'm not mistaken. So ... maybe, yeah. Just maybe.

Most of the stages are CPU limited anyway; no Titan will change anything about that.

Any OC pictures? Didn't get any PR stuff in my inbox yet and I wanna seeeeeeee stuuuuuuff!

Going to update tonight along with adding prizes from G.SKILL, ASRock and MSI!

Sorry guys, getting caught up with meetings this week. I'll update the Team Cup info pages tonight. Titan allowed, yes. Not where the limitation says "must be available in 2012".

Lol, not HWBOT HQ. Vendor HQ. Keep your agenda open on 10/11th on June!

Anyone up for an overnight bench session at HQ after computex?

Once a team is made, it will always exist. No one can delete it (except for overlords, of course) and participating users will always be linked to it. In this first cup, old submissions are allowed. This is to make the transition, ehrm, "smoother". I wanted it differently, but it makes sense to allow big scores that were set maybe 2 months ago in the spirit of not losing all that effort. Debateable, I guess.

Similar to how Schumacher quitting Ferrari didn't remove any of titles he got for Ferrari, members dropping out from a Pro OC Team will not change anything to the team's ranking. Same goes for the users: if you were part of the winning Pro OC Cup team, you will -always- be part of that winning team, even if you change to a different one the next Cup.

The result that is ranked 5th out of 5 can not be compared to a result that is ranked 165th out of 165. The position of the one result does not say anything about the other result. You can be 165th on LN2 and 5th using stock clocks. You can be 165th because you used a Pentium 3 at 3GHz which is not enough to beat any 3770K and 5th because you didn't overclock your 3960X. I can agree if you assume that the position indicate a ranking at HWBOT and those rankings have a normal spread in results. But without further information on the characteristics of the rankings and the individual results, you cannot make any exact statement about which is the better result. Not ever. Of course, you can talk in terms of probability and statistics, but we all know that statistics are useful for large sets of data, not individual datapoints.

For most vendors, who have their HQ located in Taiwan, this isn't a question about money. They all have their internal budgets for overclocking and it's merely a question how they spread that budget over the various activities. Risking openly losing against another vendor is a real concern; it may sound unbelievable to you, but believe me it is. Remember F1OC? Team ROG dropped out because they didn't want to risk getting beating by Gigabyte. Actually, the problem is not the actual losing, but within the company having to face the boss and explain why the company lost. Sponsoring the teams is a far less stressful exercise. If the team wins, a nice PR can be written. If the team doesn't win, no PR will be written. Also, the entire process of seeding boards and cards is already set in place; no real problem to keep that going. What I do see happening is closer cooperation between teams and vendors. Let's say some team manages to agree with MSI to use only their components throughout the competition, it's possible that they get a one-time quarterly invite to the office and bench as engineers (or maybe Elmor) help to debug the issues. Some vendors already do that, so I certainly see that happening with others too. It doesn't even need to happen with the HQ, might as well be a local office that asks a local team to do more PR demos and things. As for the personality aspect, I disagree. Federer does not necessarily have more personality exposure than Kobe Bryant, Ronaldo or Vettel. Usain Bolt doesn't necessarily have more personality than Messi, Michael Jordan or Derek Jeter. The ability to express you and yourself is not per definition limited by a teamsport, but can surpass that. The opposite is also true - there might be people that can be very valuable to a team with knowledge and dedication, but don't like being in the spotlights. For them, a team might actually be better on a personal level.

I'm doing my round of the vendors here in Taiwan and am specifically advising them not to create their own vendor team, but support existing teams with hardware. Of course, the first response of most of them is "let's make our vendor team", but I think it won't take too long before they will realize it's less of a risk to just help out an existing team hardware-wise than it is having their own team. Especially now that the Pro will actually have a real winner every three months. Also checking if there's interest to put up bounty $$ as incentive. That there is no feeder system is because the OC eco-system is pretty much broken. Ideally, the Overclockers League would be the feeder for the Pro OC, but rather than looking to support up and comers in the OCL, vendors and sponsors prefer to stick with the people they already know for five or more years to do the overclocking. Hence why there is so little new blood entering the Pro. Hence why Vivi was still considered a youngster at the last MOA final even though he was the youngster five years ago too. I see a lot of talent in the Overclockers League, but very few are given a fair chance I guess.

That doesn't sound right ...

Of course, an overclocker living in Siberia will have more problems. But, well, that also goes for stuff outside of overclocking. Such as finding a job or so.

Why is 5/5 better than 165/165 ?

Okay, updating MSI later today (awaiting some information) with the winner info. They will make a news item about it later this week, which you will be able to find on the front page. - Winner: Rbuass - Runner-up: Gyrock - Lucky Draw: Cagrimir (for this submission: http://hwbot.org/submission/2353621) As some of you already know, there was a problem with Xtreme Addict's result, which was done with an non-MSI graphics card. For those that like to rant and complain, you can check out the thread here. Even though the result is not valid and is removed from the competition, since the competition stage was confusing MSI will prepare a second Z77A-GD80 for Xtreme Addict. Sorry for the confusion and let's do it perfect next time!

Two options we're still considering: - as you mention: per team, where you can distinguish yourself from others by benching for different teams - based on the actual results - if your result is used for the Pro OC Team position in the stage, you get the points. The Pro OC Ranking will be centered around the teams, though. The individual user ranking is of lower importance. Similar to, for example, how the top scorer ranking relates to the Premier League ranking.