First of all, I want to start this by saying that today’s article comes from the bottom of my nerd heart, out of love for hardware and overclocking and for having a fair competition and thus can not necessarily represent the opinion of all the editors, as not everyone is so intensively involved in it. It may not seem like anything worth writing about at first, but when you are involved as deeply in the community as myself and many other folks I know, you won’t be surprised by today’s topic.
And no, the purpose of this is not to air my dirty laundry in public, blame anyone in particular or generate clicks out of pure drama. The reason for me writing this is simply my love for hardware and that I want us as a community to do better in the future. I ask you as a reader to just grant me this suspension of disbelief for your time reading. Now, what is this all about? Hwbot.org is a website for sharing and comparing hardware benchmark results and for running competitions, sometimes even with sponsorships from hardware manufacturers. I’ve written about this in the past, quite positively I’d like to think, and you can have a read again here if you may. Well, and then this happened…
Behind the Scenes of Competitive Overclocking – HWBOT G.Skill Tweakers Contest Experience Report
Update vom 03/08/23, 11:30 – Statement from Roman Hartung, hwbot.org
In the meantime, the owner of the website hwbot.org, Roman Hartung, has also contacted us and describes his view of things in a statement. You can read the complete statement unabridged and uncommented.
The G.Skill OC World Cup 2023 Online Qualifier
So on March 1st another competition started, the G.SKILL OC World Cup 2023 Online Qualifier, where the best 9 can even qualify for an invitation to Computex and battle it out for 40000 USD of real world prize money in Taipei. Pretty cool, right?!
Even if we ignore the prize money and the prestige that is present here, one thing is clear regardless: There must be clear and fair rules for any kind of competition. PERIOD. Needless to say, rules also must not change during the competition. Otherwise, well, people have advantages or disadvantages depending on when they take part (or upload their results in this case).
To understand one of the rules that was put in place, we have to understand why this rule needs to exist in the first place. You see, motherboard vendors put a lot of work into optimizing a given platform, e.g. make their motherboards better at memory overclocking than the ones of other brands. There is a lot of “secret sauce” that goes into making a bios and thus vendors like to keep their tweaks a secret as long as possible to maintain a competitive advantage. The problem begins when the best bios versions are not open to the public, but only available to in-house overlockers or sponsored affiliates.
So someone working at or with a motherboard manufacturer might simply have access to a bios that makes their system run better, faster, or more stable than a regular person with only access to public bios versions will ever be able to. Especially in a competitive scenario where a few more points or MHz can be the deciding factor, this is a huge deal and important to understand for what’s coming up.
Now to level the playing field, Hwbot came up with a rule for the aforementioned competition: Every bios version used in the competition must be uploaded to a public forum thread on the site before the competition begins. This way, everybody has access to the same bios versions that may be used in the competition, which in turn makes the competition a lot fairer and more approachable. If we want to be exact, the rule actually refers to the individual competition stages, where every stage is a different “discipline” (benchmark). The basic concept behind the rule boils down to: “Make your tools public and available for everyone to use, before the competition starts.”
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