Rauf

Confirmation as soon as possible on Fire strike version would be much appreciated!

Looking for a Kingpin Gemini pot with fast base in good condition. EU preferable. If you have one, tell me what you want for it including shipping to Sweden.

Having a ranking that no one cares about is not a positive thing in my book...

Which versions of Fire Strike and GPU-PI are ok?

No worries, I only charge 52.50€ for beta testing

Was it intended for the y-cruncher to be a low clock stage? I just tested the different calculation methods and the ones with avx2 are much faster. Even high clocks on ln2 won't help...

I have payed already Nothing strange that you pay to enter a contest, like in every other sport when there is a decent prize pool. But you probably have to change the rules. Retail/commercial BIOS only? That would make elmors and the stilts work useless. Also no XOC bioses for motherboards... Rule should be "publicly available" or something like that...

Great! I have ordered the strix OC since the non OC is not available here. Will test. Is the stilts exe a run once or we need to run it every reboot?

Come on, drop the accusations... This is of course not any fault in either of the two MB's. You can run at correct speed with both and you can run with incorrect speed with both. The key aspect is that there is no way to verify CPU-speed. But you can't verify 70% of the benchmarks here anyway. So why is this more of a problem here than anywhere else? I consider running at max bclk to be able to take a legit screenshot to be an optimization. Especially if you look at the rules for the low clock competition: "CPU Frequency in CPUZ must be lower than 5003 MHz" Consider the alternative. If the rules were: "max fluctuating CPU-freq is 5003 or less", how can you verify that? Should the users wait to catch the highest fluctuating bclk?

Thanks! Works for both normal Strix and Strix OC?

Very good guide!

Ok, actually read through the posts here and as always some major misconceptions. ES is not by definition "superior" to retail. ES CPUs are identical to retail ones as performance goes. ES is still ES even if you win it, buy it, get it for free. If you buy an ES CPU from ebay, it's still ES. Even if you buy an ES cpu from Newegg, they/you have been tricked. It's still ES... ES may or may not have serial number etc. A sticker cannot decide if a piece of hw is ES or not. Limited editions are still retail if you buy them from a store and sale is open to the public. A product sells out, tough luck. A straight from factory buy will always be ES if the product is never released to the public. No matter how many buy it. If I were to call Gigabyte and say I'll buy one board for 1 million dollars, would that make it retail? What difference does it make if 10 people call, or 20, or 30... It's still a privileged group found in an obscure forum. If a group of people from Australia were to make a group order, open to everyone on a local Australian forum would it be considered retail? If it were to happen from a small Swedish forum, all written in Swedish? I think the main concern about ES is that people shouldn't feel cheated. People will feel cheated if unreleased hw is used here, period. They might feel a little less cheated if unreleased hw takes you to the separate Elite ranking. But people still feel cheated by it...

What I find most interesting is that in other discussions here everyone agree ES is not a problem whatsoever... And yes, of course it would be ES.

Lol, what would limit to 100.00000000 bclk help. It would still be a waiting game for some to see when the lowest bclk variance hits 100.00... And we would probably see an upswing with vendor skinned cpu-z as they only show one decimal.

Good to see the scores here as well!

@Massman It's a bit similar, but evolved. Challenger is like an ordinary competition but without prizes. You bench 5 stages for maximum 50 points. Of course it's not going to attract the top guys who can improve their points by 100-150 in one single benchmark. I want to compete with the best or else there is no motivation. My idea is to get rid of the current ranking and replace it with the seasonal leagues. It has many advantages in my book: It is easier to get into. Seriously who has the time and interest nowadays to build a profile for years, collecting rare old hardware that you may or may not find the time to bench in the future. We can all agree that this is a hobby, not a profession. But the way the rankings work here requires you to work full time to keep up. We need to get it down to a hobby level amount of time. With a longer season and more stages (benchmarks) it will be worth it to invest in the hw needed. Who invests in the hw needed to be truly competitive in ch div 1? 6950X and Titan XP for maximum 50 points... We can decide on hw limitations which solves the problems of ultra expensive benching. My idea would be skylake/haswell/ivy (non -E) + non titan gpus. The non hedt-platforms are the most popular both here at hwbot and with the rest of the world. But gpus would allow for the 980 ti and 1080/ti because they are the gpus which are designed for extreme overclocking. And also they are quite popular with the gamers etc. It would not turn into a sandbagging contest, I have a clever way to make sure you push from the start until the end. We of course still have the wr/global/hw rankings. Keep the hw-league if you like for the ones that like that. People who don't want to compete in the seasonal leugues can still bench the same way they do today for a few good global positions. Maybe I will add more to the list but my train is arriving now

Ok, I never asked anyone from MSI so I don't know. But next time ask us, you'll be surprised how helpful everyone is, especially considering it's an contest.

Ok, so the competition is over. For those who wonder how to OC i3 on LN2 on XPower there are a few tricks. First of all is to set a good base profile which you can boot at around -120C. Set both mem and CPU as high as you can. Look down timings on memory, and especially RTL and IOL. Set RTL a little higher or you will reach memory limit quickly while overclocking in OS. I used 52/53 RTL and the corresponding 8/8 IOL for 2000+ memory. Once you have booted your base profile at -120, increase bclk, go down to -170 or whatever your board/CPU can handle and reboot. The key is to not change settings so much that the board needs to do full reset. A "light" reset should be able to boot at around -170. Next thing to consider is memory on XPower. XPower eats SA-volts for breakfast. Mine scaled to 1.50V. Also, like I said before, set higher RTL/IOL than on 2 dimm boards or you will be limited at around 2000 C12. If you suffer from low efficiency in Geekbench, remember to turn on AES instructions, as they are off by default on MSI XOC bioses.

Thanks MSI for a good contest, but sad it was the last one. Regarding the help from "inhouse benchers": the vendors want their products to shine of course, so it's natural they help. As long as they help everyone the same it's no problem.

Thanks! No it wasn't easy on this board, but I wanted to push as much as possible because I had to make sure I won this stage.

Points for third stage seem bugged.

It's a little funny that hwbot also wants to force the best enthusiasts into extreme league. And once they are there they have nothing. Right nvidiaforever2?

It's not about selling out or following the "new hottie". It's about being part of something that has the ability to evolve and turn into something better. Something that thrives. But most importantly: something that is meaningful in the long run. There is nothing left for competitive XOC, who is responsible for this if not hwbot? Who has not been able to adapt and evolve to not only save our "beloved hobby" from dying, but also not managed to turn it into the e-sport you promote it as. And still you want everything to stay the same. It's the world that should learn to appreciate hwbot.

Not aimed at you, just would like to hear from the mods. They have removed scores in the past...

How about bugged scores in XTU? How will you decide the slightly bugged ones like you did in the low clock challenge?