WhiteWulfe

There's always the option everyone else uses.... A screen with a high enough resolution to fit everything into one screenshot without covering up stuff

I'm only able to play with newer things because of hand-me-downs from gaming rig upgrades. I'm definitely glad to have seen you guys put in one hell of a fight! Yeah, that has to be quite the tough job... Sorting through not only all of the reports, but every single submission to ensure it's a valid one.

To start with, this is probably going to be a long reply because I just don't know the meaning of short, unless it's "short story". There's a reason why my forum sig over at OCN quotes Bassplayer saying "Dont mind Wulfe, he's just working on his story one post at a time" or something to that effect. With that out of the way, let us continue This post brought to you by a complete lack of cookies (I need to buy more), a mug of coffee (that went poof way too quickly imo), too much energy (despite it being 22:00 already), and a few aggrotech albums, but namely Hocico's "Tiempos de Furia" because I like that album. Ofensor's a fairly nice album too, and I've benched to it. Or maybe Prodigy's "The Day is My Enemy" or "Invaders Must Die" as those two are nice as well. Mmmmm, music. Also, I'm a guy. Saying that now because that whole silly joke that's gone on at OCN for a few years now needs to die, and stay dead. Sure, I've had long flowing hair just past the shoulders a few times, but definitely a guy over here. ---=====--- Wow, three years and almost a month on the 'bot until someone used a rig shot of mine to try and start something. I'm actually somewhat honoured, and I'm not being sarcastic when I say that. First and foremost though... I haven't been in the rookie league since Q4 2014, and I left the Novice league on June 26nd 2015 with my first dry ice submission. In fact, it's this one in particular: WhiteWulfe`s CPU Frequency score: 4499.6 mhz with a Core 2 Duo E8400 Needless to say, I do have some fond memories of that Duniek pot you pointed out, even if my main one nowadays is a Kingpin F1 Dragon Extreme - you can see part of the mounting hardware for that in the lower left. I don't quite understand why you're trying to say I'm posting or posing as a rookie, novice, or beginner bencher, because despite still having a TON to learn (team comms frequently have me asking TONS of questions, kind of the same thing for all of us arguably) I keep an eye on my own progress. It's nice to be able to look back and go "wow, I struggled with this or that, and now it's a quick flick of the wrist, and voila, taken care of" kind of deal. Sometimes. Maybe. Not always, but still. Additionally, with regards to hardware what I have is nowhere near top-tier, especially where most of my submissions have been made... An Asus P5E with a custom Rampage Formula bios on it. Yup, I'm arguably an old school LGA 775 bencher, and even more "fun" with all of that is the fact that my 3770k isn't really all that much of a performer. Sure, it will do 5GHz for some things, but only if I put 1.52Vcore into it. Hell, even my mouse mats were only $20 CAD or so each, including shipping, and I chose Nasus and Teemo because of various reasons. Nasus is just cool, and Teemo is that jerk AP/AD guy - I mean hit and run fighter where strategy comes into play. So says the guy who hates playing League of Legends Every piece of gear (minus the LGA 775 stuff) has been hand-me-downs from our gaming rigs - that Maximus V Formula/3770k used to be hubby's gaming rig, but now it serves as my "modern" bencher, and sometime next year I'll be adding a Z87X SOC Force/4770k as well as a Maximus IX Hero/7700k to the pile to play with when we update our gaming/content creation rigs to higher end kit. Over the past three years I've put maybe $1200 CAD into purchases that were specifically for benching, which when averaged out really isn't all that much, especially compared to those higher up guys who are actually serious about benching. Give or take, about half of that was for a nice platform to use for benching (OpenBenchTable) and my F1 Extreme Dark. Anyways! Going back to the comment about "it's supposed to be for beginners"... Please read the description as well as rules and realize that the competition was designed for ALL leagues to be able to compete in, although the first two stages are restricted to Ambient cooling methods. While I'm not a fan of how this particular competition was arranged (I would LOOOVE to be able to compete in the first and second stages!), I like how it's designed in a manner to be able to encourage the newer overclockers into pushing their gear... Prizes for first and second stage first place finishes are rather lovely, and extremely useful to those getting started, AND it's arguably easier to get MVP as a Rookie or Novice as you can submit to all FIVE stages.... Myself, the best I can possibly do overall is a maximum of 150 points for such (first place in stages 3,4, and 5) whereas a rookie arguably could get a lot more even with "just" top 5 finishes in first and second, then top 10 in stages 3-5 (174 points derived from 42+42+30+30+30).... And even better? The tie breaker is a stage that subzero benchers CANNOT RUN, so in order to beat out ANY Apprentice, Extreme, or Elite league member at the chance at the MVP prizes they literally would have to have just a Geekbench3 submission in combination with 150/100/50 points across all five stages respectively. Same thing regarding Extreme league members, except they can only get a maximum of 100 points total towards MVP. I bench specifically for fun, as I feel it's the ONLY way to bench. Some do it for personal glory, or to constantly push themselves, but for me... It's pretty much just about having fun. It's why I'll do things like run an HD 6850 in Team Competition SC4: Stage 5, and then with them help of another teammate running a 6970 try to beat out a 6970/6950 pairing with hardware that arguably just isn't as good (and it isn't, the 6850 doesn't hold a candle to the 6950 in the grand scheme of things) - but it's what I had sitting around, so I used it. Instead of complaining about people competing in categories they're allowed to compete in, especially when those people are actively going out and about within their own team to try and promote participation in a competition they may not necessarily have hardware for... I suggest looking at competitions you can specifically compete in such as the Rookie Rumbles. You would be amazed as to not only how much you can learn by doing those, but also tricks for your hardware you did not previously know. Efficiency is also something that is a HUUUUUGE skill one wants to learn, because it can be a great deal more useful than just outright brute forcing things on the 'bench. Additionally... Back when I was a rookie, I absolutely busted my ass with benching various pieces of kit to test what I had, and to see where I could potentially go with it all... I even pushed my gaming rig beyond what I was doing to it with Folding@Home (and gaming) at the time, but no matter what I did, there was always someone who was just that little bit faster, somewhat more efficient, or just had better gear. Did I let it get me down? PENGUINS WITH GUNS, NO WAY! Yeah, I wrote nonsense so it didn't say BUNNY no, but that's off topic I used that to motivate myself, to push further... To learn my hardware even more. And y'know what? It helped me out, provided me that extra bit of drive to go further, even when I was BSOD looping for six hours straight just trying to get to 5.2GHz on an E8400 paired with a P5E. I got close, but wound up 25MHz short. Did I care? Nope, I beat the main goal I had - beating Christan Ney's P5E FSB by a decent amount, and that was dealing with an fsb wall that just couldn't budget for over two years on that board until I tried something different, and it worked. My best is now almost 35MHz faster than that of the goal I had set way back when I first went subzero on the board. Now I aim at a different target, and see where it all goes, but fun and learning along the way are still my two main driving forces. Also, for the record... You don't even have to look that hard to see that I'm using a CoolerMaster 240mm AIO CLC - I like to have a lot of the other things around my benching rig because I like seeing if anyone notices some of the subtle little things I sneak into my rig shots (like the little "Forgive me" puppy that makes regular appearances in my rig shots, ESPECIALLY if I took out a teammate's HWTPP with a submission), and it's rather well known that I'm a subzero bencher since probably half to two thirds of my submissions are listed exactly as that, AND have frosty pics to go with them. My cooling pot(s) are also usually in the shot simply because I have to put them SOMEWHERE - there's only so much room in the living room to put things, and since everything is in the living room, I have to keep it relatively tidy. I do need to bring the coffee mugs back though, I miss having those in the shots. I also don't use LN2. Yeah, seriously. I don't. I also spend something like 80 minutes every benching session breaking up my dry ice by hand so that it's small enough to use in my cooling pot, since 5/8" thick/diameter pelletized dry ice is the only way I can get it. tl;dr: This competition is set up for all leagues to be able to participate, with some hardware and/or cooling restrictions in each category, as are most competitions. There are some that are ambient only, and every time one goes up some members of the Amateur, Extreme, and Elite leagues will voice their frustration with being unable to participate because of the league they're part of (and the assumption that once you go subzero, you only do subzero).

My bad on that. Somehow I saw Ti at the end. Pre-coffee brain usually doesn't add things, it misses them. ;;;;;;

1080 Ti isn't allowed in that stage: Competition's Rules

Thanks websmile! I was wondering why the table in the rules didn't make any mention of it but the description within Stage 3 did, hence why I asked (and for my initial submission, had monitoring in there anyways)

Any word on when the spare parts kit will be back?

I definitely have to agree... Getting into it for the prizes is a complete loss scenario... It's a hobby. While winning (or even getting a podium finish in a single stage!) is a nice bonus at the end, I'd greatly prefer just having fun throughout the event, getting advice from teammates (and hopefully being able to help others out), and enjoying various challenges (blech, SuperPi, so "boring" (yet I've spent two dozen hours working on it), I want my gigantic cats rampaging through cities back! ). For me, it's all about enjoying the ride, and what it brings, even if it's just LET fumes. At least this new stuff smells nicer than the old stuff I used! I used to be worried about constantly moving up in the standings, but now I prefer to just focus on learning while improving, since it's a much more enjoyable experience to me. And to those talking about how the current two leaders "have it already in the bag", the last week, and especially the last 24 hours, is where the show really starts. Been many a competition where OCN's been at the top, or near the top, and surprise maneuvers near the end have changed that rather quickly....

Why is temperature monitoring required for stage 3, where apprentices are allowed to compete? Not all CPU's will register temperatures once they go below a certain point.

x265 points are a new thing, but in regards to HWBot Prime one has been able to get points with it for a rather long time... HWBot Prime gave points back when I started here on HWBot almost three years ago.

Sure seems to be the case. A big name was heavily involved in the Cinebench image rendering scheme, yet all they had to do was post a guide and everything was called even. No loss of points, no loss of standings, and no loss of sponsors. Not even a temporary ban on the person who did it, and helped their sponsors and other elite members profit from it. If that happened in any sort of organized sport (say, I dunno, racing, where a thousandth of a second can be the difference between first and second place) there would be some serious ramifications for such. Such has also happened in the professional eSports community with teams that were caught using exploits.

Any particular reason why this change would be made six weeks into the competition when some people went out and purchased hardware specifically for this competition, and doubly so made sure to get a ruling on the hardware itself before? Saying something along the lines of "yes, it can be used, up to ten cores is perfectly fine" and then a month later changing the ruling is going to rub some people the wrong way. Just because there are only a handful of submissions posted with it to the competition at the moment doesn't mean that some teams haven't been benching the platform, or wouldn't be and just haven't posted the submissions yet. Making such a potent backtrack in rulings is bound to give off an impression that the HWBot staff could care less about the integrity of their own rulings, and that they don't care at all about fostering and growing the benching community. HWBot and OC eSports should be a platform that people are proud to be part of and support, not think "great, what will they change next, and how little time will we have to deal with it", which is still a widely held opinion about the two platforms by a decent number of benchers (look at the North America World Tour stop last year, where not even a week before the event was to start a ruling was made that no bdie would be allowed... One that had an insane amount of backlash since bdie had been available in Canada (and most markets in general) for over three months - it was changed back two days later... After a lot of benchers were forced to do crash panic purchases of e and d die dimms in order to be able to compete)

Less than a month of warning is going to throw a wrench into a number of people's plans, especially since for most vacation times have to be booked months in advance, not to mention those plane tickets and hotels (especially hotels, given how popular Pax West is). Just over a month until DreamHack too, which is going to really complicate things for a number of people because it's not really much notice. I'm glad to hear there's still a plan to have a North American stop, but my biggest question is this: what is going to happen if for some reason DreamHack doesn't pan out?

So long as it's an inch thick and you can fit an inferno backplate in there too.... I'd definitely be interested

Are those gunmetal coloured fittings with the red?

Downright insanity! Of the good kind!

Ahhhh, okay, good to know. Somehow I'd glossed over that part.

Wait, you mean it isn't focused on who can get the highest memory frequency anymore? Interesting.

It's now almost 08:00 MDT, which makes it almost 14:00 UTC. Any word on when we're going to get our competition background as it's halfway through the first day?

What's the word on pricing? Colour me curious.

Ooooh, it's cute. AND BLACK!

Many thanks! I'm hoping to be around with submissions more often now Tempted to try again before competition is over with my E8400 to try and beat my previous best, but we'll see. Took quite some time last time to get that 575.09.

While a minimum idle of 25C is nicer, I feel it's still too high. Why? A lot of people have their house thermostats at 18-20C (68-72F), and even a 240mm AIO/CLC will usually only be a few degrees above ambient temperatures - let alone those having a decent custom water loop, where idles are only 1-3C deltas. Then add in the "usual tactic" of putting a radiator in a window to draw in fresh air alongside the fact it's spring or fall and that brings lower temperatures..... One would have to rely on a hefty amount of voltage in order to actually meet that 25C idle temp. Additionally... Are we talking after having idled for two seconds, or STABLE idle temperatures, which can take a few minutes to be reached? The two are very different beasts.

That's... A rather strikingly gorgeous red.

Good to know. I'm on the fence as to whether or not I want a second OBT though, especially with the price being 33% higher than the "we aren't planning any other colours" original colouration (I really really wanted black when it went live, but that desire has been tempered a decent amount now that I have one). Are there any actual photos of the new colour offerings, or just renders so far? Additionally, will the screws and whatnot also be anodized to match the main portion?