Asus Open Overclocking Cup 2014 Final: Summary and Interviews

8Pack and der8auer Interview (cont.)

Bit-tech: Speaking more generally, a big launch this year was X99. How is X99 from an extreme overclocking perspective?

8Pack: We like it. There's a lot of skill involved with the DDR4 tuning, it's something new to test and to work out how to make efficient. And the CPUs take a lot of skill to bench well. Like we said, making a lot of profiles and really taking care with some of the voltages way down on TurboV that are not really highlights in the usual BIOS. And then, like Roman just pointed out, the CPU characteristics change a lot depending on how many GPUs you're benching, what IC is on your memory, whether you're benching with PCI-E Gen 2 or Gen 3 etc. The BCLK also makes quite a lot of difference. If you can get to like 129MHz your cold bug gets better so you can go lower. If you're in 4-way you have to keep the BCLK at 125MHz or very near the strap so your cold bug is affected and this kind of thing takes a lot more skill. Obviously an eight-core, 16-thread CPU is putting out a lot of heat as well. You have to be very precise on your pouring so when the CPU test initially hits the pot doesn’t warm up very quickly but then at the end you've got the issue with the cold bug. If there's LN2 still in the pot and the test just stops, the pot drops down very quickly and the cold bug could hit so you often have to not cool down too much and make sure there's no LN2 in the pot when it comes out of the bench. If there is, you have to hit it with the torch or the heat gun.

der8auer: Technically the Haswell-E CPUs are not really made for overclocking. Just the fact that Intel did not make those interconnect and ring bus voltages accessible shows this. They are are extreme CPUs but not for extreme overclocking. Without the Asus OC socket we would not be able to push the cache beyond say 3.6-3.7GHz, no way, because you cannot access those interconnect voltages.


Bit-tech: We also had the GTX 900 series cards from Nvidia, so same question there, what's that like for extreme overclocking?

der8auer: It's actually pretty much the same as GTX 780 Ti when it comes to overclocking, just more energy efficient so not that PSU dependant and less load which makes it easier to overclock. But the binning of the cards is quite strange. You cannot just check on air the lowest VID or the highest clock – it will not give you the best card on LN2. Even we haven't really figured out yet how you can bin the best card for LN2. We tested over 30 cards and still haven't found any patten yet.

8Pack: We had a batch of 30 at MOA and some cards that were really bad on air clocked really well on LN2, which was strange.

Bit-tech: 8Pack, how have your systems been going and what sort of feedback have you been getting?

8Pack: The systems are going well. I've just upgraded them all in line with the latest hardware, at least the X99 ones. We've got the Polaris and that's three GTX 980s water-cooled with a 5930K CPU and then the SuperNova which is the flagship with four 980s in a Rampage 5 Extreme board with a 5960X. The Z97 machines, the Hypercube and Comet, are still actually on 4770Ks. The 4770K has a better IMC and when you’re binning like we do it's much better as well on MHz. We can get 5GHz or 4.9GHz plus very high memory clocks on the older chip whereas Devil's Canyon is not offering any benefit whatsoever. In fact, it's offering worse in terms of extreme overclocking and even extreme systems, which mine are – not many people are getting 5GHz. Also, the touted improvement in Devil's Canyon thermals we found not to be true – I don't think they're any better.


Bit-tech: der8auer, you've just launched your own systems too. What are the key differences between yours and 8Pack's? Also, why are you using Devil's Canyon given what 8Pack just said?

der8auer: The main difference between our systems is the approach. Ian is more like the industrial guy; he likes to have really, really big systems where he can fit in as much radiators as possible and just have a lot of space. I'd rather have small systems where you have a lot of high performance in a really small space. That's why I actually have two m-ATX systems.

8Pack: And the look of the systems. Mine are industrial looking and Roman's are more modern.

der8auer: Obviously, if you want the best hardware there is nothing better than the 5960X CPU and the GTX 980. You can't just take out the components but you can modify everything beside it like motherboard, case, water-cooling stuff and all the OC settings. With the Devil's Canyon stuff the issue is that the 4770K is end of life. If you release a new system you have to make sure you will be able to provide those systems in the future. So, for example, if we get 50 orders of a system we would not be able to distribute them with a 4770K because there's simply not that many good CPUs left, so we had to go to 4790K.


8Pack: My systems do actually sell pretty well and I'm sure Roman's will as well. The £10-11K system is selling one every two to three weeks, and the others proportionally more.

der8auer: One thing I want to add is a bit more light on the binning process because we have the issue that a lot of customers don't see the value in the CPUs. You sometimes have to bin 50 CPUs to find a suitable one for those systems. A lot of customers are like, “yeah, I can just build the same system myself, put in a few hours for the building and just overclock the same”, but they cannot. You have to be really, really lucky to find a CPU like that and you have to put in the time for the binning as well. If you want to bin 200 CPUs its going to take a lot of time, right? So that's the actual value of those CPUs.

8Pack: With the Z97 CPUs that go in the 8Pack systems, I test them all on LN2 and they're all at least 6.5GHz [SuperPi] 32M stable, and some are 6.6GHz. Only ones that I've got for myself are over 6.7GHz, but they're even less than 1 percent. If I went down to the other competitors here and said, “this is a 6.6GHz Haswell, how much will you pay me?”, they'd be bidding up to $2,000 easily, because it gets you to the competitions and it gets you high up in the rankings.

Bit-tech: As world no. 1 and German no. 1 what's next for you in terms of extreme overclocking?

der8auer: We actually want to team up more. We figured out that together we have a lot of skills we can combine and if we work together we can both improve and learn form the other one. For both of us, the main thing is to dominate HWBot rankings.

8Pack: That will obviously help to market our systems in our respective forums. Caseking will be launching a forum fairly soon and Roman will have his section. Also to keep gaining our reputation. I'm going to GOC but after that I'll be looking to bench with Roman quite a lot.


Bit-tech: It seems like extreme overclocking is growing, albeit slowly. How do you think it's going to develop over the next few years?

der8auer: That's quite difficult. The thing is that a lot of people are afraid of overclocking and still think that whenever you touch your system and overclock something it's straight up going to die, which is just not true, so we have to spread the word that overclocking can be helpful and fun. Most of the overclocking we do is not needed for daily performance – it doesn't matter if your CPU is running at 4.3GHz or 4.4GHz, you don't notice any difference from 100MHz. But the stuff we do, the real benchmarking, that's really more like a sport where you try to improve something and be better than somebody else, that's what we like. We both have the same thing – if we're close to having a record you can really feel the adrenaline running through your body. It's really, really exciting and that's a really cool thing.

8Pack: Now with the way HWBot is working with the vendors there's a lot of competitions and quite good prize money and exposure for the overclockers who do well so of course they're going to be like that when there's $5,000 riding on the end of a benchmark. There's a lot of adrenaline when you're so close to such prizes, or not so close as the case may be... But with Intel and big players putting money into promoting extreme overclocking I can only see the community getting bigger.

der8auer: We need to get new blood into extreme overclocking. That's a thing we want to do with Caseking as well giving an overclocking school or tutorials for extreme overclocking. We're probably going to host some kind of contest where people can qualify online with random hardware to show they have some basic knowledge and maybe the top 10 we will take to a special workshop for two days, provide free hardware, LN2 etc. and teach them how it works. Maybe we can get some new guys like that.

Bit-tech: Well, we look forward to it! Thanks for talking to us guys.