Who do you usually have overclocking sessions with if anyone and how often are you having these LN2 sessions ? I bench alone since I don ’ t know anyone close enough to bench with me . I get LN2 delivered roughly every two weeks and can usually do about 3 session on the 30L I get . Usually I reserve the LN2 for the live streams so that means I bench every Saturday after a delivery . Once I can store more LN2 I also want to do some of stream benching but as of right now that ’ s not going to happen any time soon .
If you could only pick a single brand of components to buy hardware from , which brand would that be and why is that ? This is a hard one . I guess I would go with ASUS . They make great motherboards and their GPUs are also generally pretty good even if the cooling is sometimes subpar but I can swap that out pretty easily .
What is your favourite platform and which is your least favourite ? I really like AM3 +. It ’ s cheap there are tons of CPUs for it . Most of the chips are CB and CBB free and the FSB gives you a lot of control . I hate X99 . It is by far the least consistent platform I ever used . From one boot to the next the motherboard would boot just fine , drop RAM channels or fail to POST even if I didn ’ t change any BIOS settings . That just makes benching with it really really frustrating . Though there is a chance that my motherboard was just bad because it did die eventually so once I get the replacement it might get better but I doubt it .
Of all the hardware you ’ ve ever owned , what is your favourite of all time ? ( This isn ’ t limited to just motherboards or graphics cards , but CPUs , memory , storage etc .) I guess my Rampage IV Extreme . It was my first motherboard and it was a pleasure to work with when I started out and once I really got into overclocking it handled it perfectly and even now it ’ s going strong though I suspect that the 3960X in it is on it ’ s last legs from spending so much time above 1.6V .
Between 3D benchmarks and the more CPU / memory focused ones such as XTU and SuperPi , GeekBench etc ., which ones are you partial to ? My first benchmark was Cinebench R11.5 and I ’ ve stuck to it since . For 3D I like Firestrike and Unigine since they both put a lot of load on the GPU .
With that said , what are the best and worst benchmark of all time for you ? That ’ s a hard one . I know I don ’ t like XTU . Mostly because it doesn ’ t work on AMD but all the other issues surrounding it don ’ t make me like it any more . But the best benchmark I have no idea .
Do you do any kind of binning for your overclocking or are you more concerned with extracting the best out of what you have regardless of your particular sample quality ? I don ’ t bin seriously . If I have 2 or 3 of some piece of hardware I will choose the best one for certain uses but I don ’ t go out and buy 10 + of one part just to find the best one . Binning would significantly eat into my ability to bench as much different hardware as possible .
8 The OverClocker Issue 39 | 2016