The monthly competitions ...

Hey guys,

It's almost a year since we started the monthly HOC competitions and since winning/participating in these competitions will give you some points for the individual league, I'd like to know your thougths on the competitions so far.

Anything we need to change? What do you like, dislike? Other comments?

I like vintage HOC competitions, or special ones like (only one cpu/core). (maybe because I have got a lot of old hardware )

I like contests that do not cost the earth to compete in.

Multi stage contests seem to favour those who can afford the hardware only.

Should I reduce the number of stages?

What about the team competitions? Less or more fun than individual comps?

I just do not know to be honest. The one contest that was really popular and had heaps of engagement involved really inexpensive kit for the most part.

And as to your second point I guess the main thing is what kind of participation will team contests bring v individual contests. Is there any historical data that you can look at? Must be I guess.

1/08/2009 -- F1 Competition - 2009 Q3

17/08/2009 -- AMD Phenom II X4 Competition

9/09/2009 -- Massman's Nehalem/Westmere 3DMark01 challenge

14/09/2009 -- XtremeSystems Cheapazchips Challenge Fall 2009

4/11/2009 -- HWBOT Country Cup 2009

12/11/2009 -- MSI Xtreme Speeder P55

16/12/2009 -- Malaysia HWBot Super Pi 32M Online Challenge

1/01/2010 -- HWBOT OC Challenge January 2010

1/02/2010 -- HWBOT OC Challenge February 2010

1/03/2010 -- GIGABYTE H55/H57 IGP OC Challenge

1/03/2010 -- HWBOT OC Challenge March 2010

1/04/2010 -- OC Guru is YOU! - GIGABYTE AMD HD 5870 OC Challenge

1/04/2010 -- HWBOT OC Challenge April 2010

12/04/2010 -- Overclockers.com Benching Team SuperPi Competition!

13/04/2010 -- Gigabyte GOOC2010 Iran Qualification

1/05/2010 -- OC GURU IS YOU – GIGABYTE AMD HD 5000 OC Challenge

1/05/2010 -- HWBOT OC Challenge May 2010

1/06/2010 -- You've Got The Xtreme Power!

1/06/2010 -- MSI Fun! OC Festival

1/06/2010 -- Pentium G6950 Contest

1/06/2010 -- GOOC 2010 Serbia (ex-YU) Online Qualifiers

1/06/2010 -- HWBOT OC Challenge June 2010

10/06/2010 -- MSI Invites you to be part of Campus Party Colombia

23/06/2010 -- Overclock.net's GPU challenge!

1/07/2010 -- GIGABYTE 800 series contest!

1/07/2010 -- HWBOT OC Challenge July 2010

25/07/2010 -- ASUS Overclocker 2010

1/08/2010 -- GIGABYTE H55 miniITX contest

1/08/2010 -- Latin MOA 2010

1/08/2010 -- HWBOT OC Challenge August 2010

1/09/2010 -- GIGABYTE 2010 Best 3D Overclocker Contest

1/09/2010 -- HWBOT OC Challenge September 2010

16/09/2010 -- MSI's hunt for 450 & 460 - OC Challenger

1/10/2010 -- HWBOT OC Challenge October 2010

18/10/2010 -- MSI MOA 2011 Americas Online pre-selection

25/10/2010 -- MadOnion Nostalgia Festival

1/11/2010 -- Gigabyte Core Prime contest!

1/11/2010 -- HWBOT OC Challenge November 2010

I'm... not really a fan of having to take part in competitions in order to rank higher. It makes the cost of benching more expensive and the timing may or may not fit in with the free time benchers have.

Theres also the ever-present company conflict possibility. Random example..... if the Global No.1 and 2. were heavily sponsored by say... Gigabyte and Asus (I know theres a parallel to the reality here, but.. ignore that,) then MSI have a competition... whoever takes the risk of ****ing off their main sponsor is the one who stays at no.1?

Then there's company-supported guys maybe getting "free entry" to the competitions etc....

I do like the competitions though, even though i've never taken part

The main idea is to give people who have a lack of hardware a chance on improving their personal rank through a competition. It's not to make ot obligatory to compete in competitions, rather as a small reward for those who try.

It's not like this would be 50% of the individual rankings; rather 5% or so.

ok Not so bad.

I hope the competitions use parts that are priced right for the HWB award... if that makes sense? If the buy-in for a competition is £250-300 (the IGP compo will come close to that for the top scores) then it would be better to invest in a GTX480 instead etc

Do you have any idea when we can see a prototype of the new scoring algorithm?

That's something I want to know from you guys: what is considered 'too high' for a competition that's only for fun (MOA and GOOC are not in this category).

A prototype of the ranking will be available in december.

Well, any competition thats based on hardware class (1156 or H55 IGP etc) is very likely to be ruled by the top chips for the class and the most expensive board (P55 Classi, M3E etc)

Being specific to CPU/GPU/board helps control the cost... like the G6950 or H55-itx compo

For GPUs, would it work to use a rough rule of "the cheapest card that has a reference design?"

+1 for the contests. Keep them coming. They keep it fun.

write a randomize algorithm that picks one benchmark & CPU/VGA from a pool of hardware based on popularity overtime, recent time, number of results per user, etc

that way you can still choose to manually pick stuff, or let the bot decide

Well, any competition thats based on hardware class (1156 or H55 IGP etc) is very likely to be ruled by the top chips for the class and the most expensive board (P55 Classi, M3E etc)

 

Being specific to CPU/GPU/board helps control the cost... like the G6950 or H55-itx compo

 

For GPUs, would it work to use a rough rule of "the cheapest card that has a reference design?"

Specifying to GPU/VGA gives as nasty side-effect that more people will actually have to buy new hardware to compete. Using more general limitations allows more people to give it a shot.

I'll say for the current one - bad idea using PCMV (quite a long test) and dividing only by core count. Core i5/i7 FTW and AMD for the odd core counts. Too many hw to find and it's not the cheapest one.

 

Yes, less stages would be nice - one or two. 4 is overkill. And more old 'n' fun hardware

You do realize that the idea behind multi-stage team competitions is that it's encouraging teams to work together to take the win, right?

Specifying to GPU/VGA gives as nasty side-effect that more people will actually have to buy new hardware to compete. Using more general limitations allows more people to give it a shot.

Hmmmm... true. It's a flip-a-coin situation... open category means the most expensive hardware and overall I would guess the M3E or P55 Classi is owned by fewer people than the P7P55 or UD3 example, so might still be looking at a purchase to do well in a compo.

What about a range of hardware? "Use between I3 530 and I5 661" or "must be a P7P55 series board" etc?

Only P55 boards with one pcie x16-slot allowed:D

Hmmmm... true. It's a flip-a-coin situation... open category means the most expensive hardware and overall I would guess the M3E or P55 Classi is owned by fewer people than the P7P55 or UD3 example, so might still be looking at a purchase to do well in a compo.

 

 

What about a range of hardware? "Use between I3 530 and I5 661" or "must be a P7P55 series board" etc?

Also ... open categories are easier to set up ().

In the HWBOT Country Cup, one of the stages was Core i7 with fixed max multiplier of 20x. This allowed everyone from 920 to 975 to compete.

I think it is a very difficult issue to reach a compromise on. There is no way that it is possible to make all people happy all the time. Some one or some group is going to feel hard done by. But I do think that HWBOT is trying their best to bring communities together and as such we need to support the contests more I think from within our local forums.

If the competitions are a month long as they have been. I think that it would be better to focus on one benchmark per month. This will give people the thing i think we need most time. Having time to test maybe a couple of cheap single core chips or replace a dead mobo would make the comps more accessible to working folk:) I think this would mean a greater amount of submissions and better tweak disscusion for each bench.