Behind the Scenes of Competitive Overclocking – HWBOT G.Skill Tweakers Contest Experience Report

1 - What even is HWBOT? 2 - How does Competitive Overclocking work? 3 - Asus Maximus XIII Apex as a real OC weapon 4 - Competition diary with happy ending 5 - Impressions and links

How do competitions work on HWBOT?

One such competition is the G.Skill Tweakers Contest mentioned at the beginning of this article, where G.Skill memory is used to compete against each other in various disciplines. With this example I want to show you how such a competition works, what you have to pay attention to, and give you some of my tips and tricks.

First of all you have to know if, when and under which rules a competition takes place. As with many websites, HWBOT has a forum where you can find discussions about hardware and suggestions for improving the website, as well as announcements of new competitions. If you’re not a fan of forums, you can also just join the HWBOT Discord server, which is also linked in the footer of the page.

Also here the moderators inform in special channels about planned and taking place competitions, and are to you with questions to the rules gladly at the disposal, whereby one as bloutiger beginners often also other members can help naturally already further. In general, the community is very friendly and helpful in dealing, so it’s worth a look. By the way, as soon as a competition is started, you can find it in the Competitions tab at the top of the website – who would have thought it.

Often competitions are divided into different disciplines, as in this case, for which there are individual rankings, but also points that then count for the ranking of the entire competition. To make the competition interesting for members of all leagues, there is also a division into “Extreme”, i.e. extreme coolants such as liquid nitrogen, and “Ambient”, i.e. normal air and water coolers.

Afterwards it is very important to familiarize yourself with the running time and the rules for the respective discipline or stage. In this case, as mentioned, a memory kit from the manufacturer G.Skill must be used. The choice of CPU and platform is free, but the maximum core clock is 5005 MHz and the temperature must not fall below 20° C in order not to gain an unfair advantage.

The benchmark is “PyPrime – 2b”, provided by HWBOT’s tool “Benchmate”. Benchmate is an application that you install like any other and is used to monitor the system during the benchmark run. So you first start Benchmate and from there again the benchmark, in this case PyPrime. Benchmate runs all the time with services in the background and monitors the system.

The purpose of this is to ensure that no one can gain an unfair advantage by making changes to the system during the benchmark. The backend is the well-known tool HWInfo, which Benchmate uses to monitor system timers, temperatures, clock speeds and various other telemetry data to make sure everything is in order. At the end of the benchmark, Benchmate even saves the result – if you want it to – with a screenshot and system information in a collective file, which is then later used to submit the result.

Here again the rules are important, which in this case specify that CPU-Z tabs for CPU, Memory, Mainboard and SPD must be visible on the screenshot. Especially on smaller monitors, you sometimes have to juggle the windows a bit so that everything is really visible and correctly documented on the screenshot. Especially when the system is running on the edge of stability for a maximum benchmark result, saving the result is often even more of a challenge!

Additionally, you have to submit photos of your system and of the used G.Skill memory chips, on the one hand to increase transparency but of course also to promote the used memory products of the manufacturer a little bit. Once you have your results and photos, all you need to do is upload them. After uploading the Benchmate results file, you can voluntarily enter additional information about the hardware used in the system, such as power supply or graphics card, and then attach the photos.

Now confirm that you have read the rules, that you will abide by them and then just submit the result. Actually super easy if you did it a few times and you didn’t save the wrong CPU-Z tabs in the screenshot, like it happened to me moron in the last competition with the best result. Fairness on the one hand also means a tough exclusion in case of a violation of the rules on the other hand. The result would not have been in accordance with the rules and would have been invalidated by the moderators. That’s the right way to do it, though, so that in the end there’s fair competition.

When submitting results, there are of course various tactics. Not uploading your best result right away, keeping a backup result in reserve, or publishing your best result as close to the end as possible – a la Ebay auction – in order to give your competitors as little time as possible to react and follow up, are popular tricks. Whether you want to use them, everyone must decide for themselves, but you should be aware of them at least.

Now the G.Skill Tweakers contest was just a single example and if you don’t have RAM from G.Skill, don’t despair. On the contrary, there are always competitions for various types of hardware, such as the recently launched Challenger 2021 divisions with different CPU core counts or the SuperPi 32M Low Clock Challanges for Intel and AMD platforms, so there is already something for everyone.

And if you believe the statements of the moderators in Discord, which you usually should, there will be even more and even bigger hardware manufacturer sponsored competitions in the course of the year. And of course, the more people who join in, the bigger and more diverse the competitions become. 😉