Gigabyte X99 SOC Champion: 8Pack world record interview

Keen to reclaim the crown of the world's number one overclocker, British-born 8Pack selected the Gigabyte X99 SOC Champion for his latest set of attempts. KitGuru caught up with him in his O/C Lab at Overclockers.co.uk's HQ in Stoke.

Scores for a range of benchmarks are all brought together at HWBOT where the crown for ‘World's Number One Overclocker' is decided on an on-going basis. Given how many manufacturer-supported engineers there are in the world, setting even one record can be difficult in 2015 – let alone taking enough records to pick up the number one spot. The dedication of this elite group of clockers is apparent when you understand that Ian ‘8Pack' Parry was only given 3 Titan X cards for his recent attempts, so he went about bought 3 more to make sure he had the best possible chance for success. If you're going to use up £5,400 worth of graphics cards just to set records, then you need to be pretty sure of your platform before you start to work on the VRMs.

Key to that success was the Gigabyte X99 SOC Champion mainboard. It as been stripped down, pared back and souped-up specifically to help set records. It has been very successful in that capacity. Originally designed solely for engineers, it is also available to the general public. At the time of going to press, it was just over £200 in the UK. While that isn't cheap for a motherboard, there are X99 boards out there which sell for up to 2x that price point. On that basis, you have to say that it represents good value.

In this video, 8Pack explains the work necessary to become the world's number one and the kind of resources it takes to win records in 2015.

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KitGuru says: Reducing the number of memory slots, moving them close to the CPU and including a lot of extra features to prevent failure when frozen, the Gigabyte X99 SOC Champion is the mainboard equivalent of a rally car. Everything has been focused on performance to help set world records. Yet, at the same time, 8Pack has also managed to create rendering machines with the same core components – adding a ‘street legal' edge to the set up. How far into the future will this kind of performance be available in a system costing £999 we wonder?

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