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

Diary of a competition tinkerer

Since the just mentioned Comet Lake CPU from my daily system has a very strong memory controller thanks to luck in the silicon lottery, I had hoped to use it to compete in this stage of the PYPrime “memory benchmark”. But unfortunately, no, not at all. This is because the mathematical operations that PYPrime 2b performs, i.e. calculating pi up to the two-billionth digit, simply runs far faster on Rocket Lake CPUs than on Comet Lake.

Even twice as fast RAM with lower latencies is of little help if the CPU IPC performance becomes a bottleneck. Even if Rocket Lake isn’t an upgrade for gaming, for overclocking the switch to the new Intel platform is mandatory, at least for this benchmark.

So said done, Rocket Lake CPU installed and as long as you stay in Gear 1, the PYPrime takes only 7 seconds instead of about 8, percentage wise this saving is blatant. It also turned out that hyperthreading should be disabled to further optimize per-core performance for this single-threaded benchmark. After testing my G.Skill RAM kits, I also noticed that especially dual-rank RAM kits and 1T Command Rate bring additional performance bonuses. Now it was just a matter of fiddling, testing, grinding, to gradually find the best settings for the fastest result and save them too!

In the meantime, the Windows 10 installation went down the drain, because it was corrupted by the unstable RAM. At this point it should be said that I use a dedicated Windows installation for RAM-OC, of course, so no important data was at risk. Nevertheless, it was a setback, moreover the colleague Midnight703 from the USA took the lead with a Windows 7 image quite at the same time.  

By the way, this is what it looks like when the system crashes while saving a screenshot. Now I was faced with the dilemma: Re-install Windows 10 or try to install Windows 7? Since Intel has only installed USB 3 controllers on the CPU since Skylake, but Windows 7 does not include any drivers in the installation image by default, the installation on modern hardware is anything but easy. Variables like UEFI vs. BIOS-CSM, Secure Boot and BIOS versions also complicate the installation enormously. In the end, after hours and hours of trial and error, I couldn’t do it and was about to admit defeat – the Windows 10 score wasn’t fast enough, Windows 7 seemed impossible.

But then – like in a cheesy coming of age movie – a community member called Sparky’s Adventures came to my rescue, encouraging me to give Windows 10 another try after all. His statement that my settings should actually bring a better result and his shared experiences in the competition encouraged me for a final attempt. Not even 12 hours before the end of the competition I achieved my best valid result of 6.224 seconds. Now it was just upload and hope, at which point I was still firmly assuming I would be underbid. And what’s that saying? The rest is history.