ASUS ROG Open and Open Overclocking Cup: From the Ukraine with Awesome!

The ASUS Open has been going on since 2003, but for 2012 ASUS and ROG had more in store: the ASUS Open Overclocking Cup was added, with both events taking place at Kiev’s CyberSport Arena December 13-16. Just in time for the holiday season, gamers and overclockers flocked to the events, most from the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and Europe.

On my command, unleash gaming

The more traditional ASUS Open is a full-on gaming tournament where only the toughest survive. OK, everyone actually survives and has a good time, but only the toughest win prizes. The inauguaral ASUS Open Overlocking Cup launched a new tradition, one geared towards hardcore component tuning and the pursuit of PC performance world records.

Overview of the event

Together, the two events had more than 12,000 participants and visitors in attendance, and served as yet another great opportunity for community building. Both were completley organized and funded by ASUS, so kudos to the local teams for all their hard work! In addition to showing the close relations ROG and ASUS have with gamers and overclockers worldwide, the events provided a venue for gaming and tweaking pros to share knowledge with each other and with beginners. Classes on overclocking were offered, and there was a rather impressive liquid cooling showcase for a closing ceremony.

And another vista of the action

The ASUS Open this year had a massive 700 different teams taking part, with intense competiton for the grand prize of US$69,000. All these gamers converged and engaged in virtual combat across different game titles: Dota 2, Counter Strike 1.6, Point Blank, and World of Tanks. Several famous clans were on hand, including NA’VI, Empire, Virtus.pro, The RED:Rush, and many more. When the dust settled, the winners were Empire (Dota 2), Kerchnet (Counter Strike 1.6), The RED: Rush (World of Tanks), and ROX.KIS (Point Blank). Congrats!

Prepping for some overlocking

The ASUS Open Overclocking Cup attracted many notable PC tuning maestros, who tried their hand at PiFast, CPU and GPU benchmarking, SuperPi, and several 3DMark generations. There were different challenges as devised by the ROG and ASUS team, some quite demanding. Hardware included ROG Maximus V Extreme motherboards and MATRIX HD 7970 graphics cards, plus Intel Core i7-3770K processors. Smoke, 12, Xtreme Addict, Perica_Barii, Aristidis, Matose, SF3D, Stummerwinter, Cyclone, and Tolsty were among the celebrity overclockers taking part in the event. Xtreme Addict (who hails from Poland) and Perica_Barii (of Montenegro) took home US$1500, two ASUS ROG Maximus V Extreme motherboards, two ASUS HD 7970 graphics cards, an Intel Core i7-3770K processor, and Corsair Dominator Platinum memory each! Quite the loot.

And keeping a close eye on those numbers

A big thank you to everyone involved in organizing and making these events a success, and here’s to next year’s showdowns, which wer’e sure will be even bigger, better – and more competitive!

There's no cooling like liquid cooling!

Lots of overclocking goodness on show

Right next to the coveted prizes

And trophies!

And at the conclusion of it all, the champions pose!