The overclocking “Battle of the North” at DreamHack

Intel and ASUS in cooperation with TeliaSonera and Hardware.info will organize the first ever multi location live overclocking during DreamHack Winter 2008 and Het Multimedia Event. The matches between three national teams will be broadcasted live over the Internet.


The participating overclockers, representing Sweden, Finland and the Netherlands, will stretch the limits of PC computing power on the brand new Intel Core i7-965 processor in a live streamed ‘Battle of the North’.

“Overclocking is like drag racing or formula one but with PC hardware instead of race cars. This unique upcoming battle will be the ultimate test of who masters the art of pushing PC computing power to the max. We have already seen a number of world-records set with the brand new Intel Core i7-965 processor and I would not be surprised if we get to see even more during this live match,” says Nicklas Aglert, Consumer Market Development Manager at Intel.

“Having three national overclocking teams competing live from three different locations on exactly the same hardware configuration is exciting. By crossing the country borders, this battle will bring out the best of every team,” adds Kurt De Buck, Marketing Manager at Intel.

This year's DreamHack Winter, the world’s largest computer festival with over 10,000 PCs connected to a single LAN, will take place on November 27th to 30th in Jönköping, Sweden. Intel will be there in force, showcasing the new Intel Core i7 processor.

“Intel Core i7 is one of the biggest improvements of the processor architecture that we have done in a very long time and it will bring increased performance not only for extreme overclocking but also for more average usage, like gaming or video editing. With four cores, multi-threading, QuickPath Interconnect and turbo mode it takes PC computing to the next level,” says Thomas Melzer, Technology Specialist at Intel.

The international overclocking battle between Sweden, Finland and Netherlands will take place in the Intel/ASUS booth (hall B) and the TeliaSonera booth (hall D) at DreamHack in Sweden and at the Hardware .info booth at Het Multimedia Event in the Netherlands, simultaneously on Friday Nov 28th and Saturday Nov 29th. The competition will also be streamed live on the Internet for those who can’t make it to the events in person.

Team Sweden
Representing Sweden (competing at DreamHack) will be “Kinc” (Markus Hultin) and “Crotale” (Robert Kihlberg).

Team Finland
Representing Finland (competing at DreamHack) will be “Sampsa” (Sampsa Kurri) and Ville Suvanto.

Team Netherlands
Representing the Netherlands (competing at Het Multimedia Event) will be Hardware.info’s Masters of Overclocking, consisting of “Extera” (Mark van Velthoven) “Oldscarface” (Roger Kortenhoeven) and “Viss” (Bart Peters)

The technology
The equipment that will be used by all three teams during the competition includes the quad-core Intel Core i7-965 Extreme Edition processor, ASUS Rampage 2 Extreme / ASUS P6T motherboards and ASUS NVIDIA GTX 280 / ATI 4870 X2 graphics adapters.

Intel Core i7-965 Extreme Edition, which already has been used to set several new overclocking world records, is one of three new Intel processors based on the 45-nanometer Nehalem architecture and which are being launched in November. The other two models are Core i7-920 and Core i7-940.

Additional information about Intel’s activities at DreamHack Winter 2008 can be found at the Facebook event “Intel @ DreamHack Winter 2008”.