GIGABYTE Kicked off their 2018 Season of OC contests her eon OC-ESPORTS just a few weeks ago with the GIGABYTE AORUS Winter Challenge contest. With just one week left, it’s time take a quick look at the current leaders, the CPUs and boards being used, the scoring and of course the great prizes up for grabs.

GIGABYTE AORUS Winter OC Challenge: Feb 1st – Feb 28, 2018

Running throughout the month of February 2018, the contest is allows overclockers to use any Intel processor with 6 or less physical cores (disabled cores not allowed). However, to create a more level playing field, processors cannot use CPU core or cache frequencies above 5GHz. Contestants must use a GIGABYTE / AORUS motherboard and submit using the contest wallpaper to ensure only fresh submissions count. The contest spans three separate stages each starting and ending on a different date to keep interest levels peaked throughout. Let’s take a look at the stages to get a snaphot of who looks in the frame for some great hardware prizes from GIGABYTE.

Stage 1: XTU (Feb 1st – 10th)

Stage 1 of the contest ultimately acts as a tiebreaker with only one actual contest point awarded for all contestants that make a submission. Why do we need that? The way the contest is setup, using a max-5GHz, max-6-core limitations, we can expect plenty of overclockers to be hitting very similar scores. Stage 3 will act as the first tiebreaker, followed by Stage 2 with XTU scores in Stage 1 used as a final decider.

At the top of Stage 1 we find Nik (Germany) at the top of the stable with a leading XTU score of 2,825 marks. As you would expect, he used an Intel Core i7 8700K, plus a GIGABYTE Z370N WIFI mini0ITX form factor motherboard. Crucially he configured his DDR4 system memory at 2,036MHz (12-12-12-28), a configuration that may well have benefited from the smaller motherboard and shorter trace paths on the PCB itself. Every edge counts in a contest centered on memory and OS tweaking, which is what we’re looking at when CPU clocks are limited.

Read the full and detailed contest update article here on OC-ESPORTS.