QA
Jonathan “Strong Island”Passero
Country Name and City:
I am from United States, Long
Island, New York.
What language(s) do you speak in
addition to English if any?
I took Spanish in high school but
don’t speak any other language
fluently.
Your nick, “strong island 1”, any
special meaning behind it and what
does it mean?
It’s something that people from
Long Island say, meaning we are a
powerful island. It originally was my
xbox gamertag and I always kept it.
Now I changed it to Strong Island. The
1 doesn’t mean anything.
By extreme overclocking standards,
you’re relatively new to LN2
overclocking. How long have you
been overclocking with LN2 and what
is it about LN2 that has you hooked?
It’s been almost 2 years since I first
touched Liquid Nitrogen. I originally
bought the 780 ti K|NGP|N Edition to
overclock on water and I didn’t see
much difference on water compared
to my 780 ti Classified.
So I had to try and overclock on
liquid nitrogen to try and see it’s full
potential.
My first night went poorly and I
almost gave up but the next day I
called in sick from work and said
to myself I had to give it one more
try. That night I broke 1850mhz core
clock and had like the #2 score on the
3dmark firestrike leaderboard.
That feeling was so amazing and I
had so much fun that I never stopped
using ln2 since then and I have been
having a blast. If it wasn’t for the
K|NGP|N Edition card allowing me
to have those results on my first
6 The OverClocker Issue 36 | 2015
weekend I might not have ever stuck
with it.
taste in my mouth but I would love to
try it again.
How many live overclocking events
have you attended if any and if not,
which ones would you like to take part
in in future?
I have actually never attended a live
event. I have never been invited and
there hasn’t been any near where I
live. I really would love to experience
Computex and the overclocking that
went on there. It looked like so much
fun.
Not too long ago you were benching
an old 8800GTS graphics card.
Compared to modern GPUs, do you
find this easier or harder to bench, is
it more exciting or less so?
I have been having so much fun
with my 8800gts 512mb. It is actually
my very first successful zombie
card. I am having a blast with it.
The other night on water cooling
the 8800 zombie was scaling up to
1.65v, meaning there was so much
oc headroom to play with, going up to
about 950mhz on ambient temp water.
It’s a lot of fun. Plus you have the
shader clock meaning a little more to
tweak, which is always good.
The 8800gts 512mb card is pretty
easy to bench and very relaxing on ln2
because it’s a small chip and doesn’t
generate a ton of heat. I get excited
benching any gpu so they are both fun
in there own ways.
You bench as part of the massive
and highly competitive overclock.
net team, did you join that team in
particular because of their quality
or was it primarily because that was
your chosen forum where you spent
most of your time?
I had already been benching a lot
for the overclock.net bench threads,
especially Valley was my favourite,
and I am a benchmark editor at OCN
so it just felt natural to join the OCN
team. A lot of the guys have been
really cool over there teaching me
about the ins and outs of hwbot and
tweaking. The forums are also very
busy so it’s fun to talk to people about
overclocking and hardware.
Whom do you bench with primarily if
anyone or are you a lone overclocker
mostly?
Unfortunately I am a lone bencher.
I wish there were more people in my
area to overclock with. I would love to.
The one time I did bench with someone
it went very badly. We both brought
gear to bench and we killed one of my
kingpin cards and still had a ton of
nitrogen left and he refused to use any
of his gear after that and we couldn’t
use the nitrogen. That left a little bad
In keeping with the old school
benchmarks. Between 3DMark
2001se and Aquamark3, which is
your favourite and do you believe that
these benchmarks should still be
given points going forward?
I really love 3dmark01, I haven’t had
a ton of experience with Aqumark3. I
really like these benchmarks because
there is a ton of things to tweak. A
lot of the new firestrike benches are
mostly click and run, which I love also,
but there is something really fun about
challenging yourself and learning how
to produce a great 3d01 score.
My highest so far is about 170,000
but I’m still working on it. Hopefully
Skylake can help me with that. I
would hate to see points removed,
it’s nice to have a challenge to work