"That can't be it. Surely." I remember thinking to myself. It really was a sight to behold. The Raddison Edwardian Bloomsbury Hotel stood before me, and it was intimidating. I felt like such a peasant. Me and my jeans, t-shirt and years old biking backpack. The people entering there were wearing suits and  carrying briefcases. They looked important.

Still, it was the right place, and having been lucky enough to win a trip to Asus' Xtreme Global Summit held here, I would have gone in even had I been naked. That's a lie. But I had been looking forward to this since I heard I was going. Nothing was going to stop me.

The lobby was huge, and everything looked very modern and expensive. It was like being in another world. I made my way over to a receptionist to get directions. After being taken a few feet to my left and having my destination explained to me by the very helpful receptionist, I set off towards the sign up table. I logged that I was here, signed away and received my name tag. Now I felt special. The nametag gave my real name, as it did with everybody. Several people, myself included, therefore decided to write our bit-tech usernames on the tags to help identify ourselves to the other winners.

Asus had decided to book two conference rooms next to each other in order to host their event. The rooms had the middle wall separated to make them combine in to one big room. There wasn't too great a turn out when I checked the first time, but I was (intentionally) quite early, so took up the promised free food. I just assumed there would be some bits to pick from, put together by Asus (I was expecting some sarnies and a brew!), but it turned out they had bagged us a free buffet meal from the hotel's restaurant. Score! I helped myself to smoked salmon and some chicken, with roast potatoes and some other sides. It was good. Fresh orange juice as well. I met up with some other competition winners (they weren't too hard to spot, looking a lot like me) and had a good chat. All in all, it was a great welcome and I was very much looking forward to the day.

We heard that the event was going to start, and so made our way to the event room. We had a few minutes to look around before the presentation started, so I decided to take some pictures and have a real good peek at everything. There were a lot of interesting things on show, of particular interest to me was the "Sabretooth 55i"; I had never seen, and indeed think no one else had at the time, this board before. It seemed familiar though, and reminded me of a concept that Asus released a while back.

It listed some funky sounding features;

·         CeraM!X Heatsink Coating Tech

·         CoolMem! Fan Frame

·         E.S.P. [Efficient Switching Power Design]

·         TUF Cap. & MOSFET (certified by military-standard)

I also noticed a fan positioned to blow air lengthways along the RAM, rather than down on it like third party RAM cooling methods. It looked swish and well implemented, so I will be interested to see how it pans out in terms of actual cooling performance.

I took some pictures of the setups we would be overclocking for the competition, as well as the prizes. It looked like we had a great day ahead of us.

We took our seats in preparation for the presentation. The exact details of the event allude me, but they talked about their design philosophies, the OC Station and how it actual started as a prototype years ago, and even gave an interesting look at old school overclocking.  Finally, they gave a talk on how to overclock the P55 platform, rough ideas of voltages, and the new terminology for those used to LGA775 offerings and, to a lesser extent, those used to i7.

We were told the format of the event would be 3 competitions; the overclocking (in teams, more on the scoring in a minute), fastest lap on GRID (the lap used for benching cards no less) and fastest completion time on Trials HD (the last level in the demo).

Points would be awarded on an individual basis for the two games, where as the teams would get points based on the overclocking, with the score the team gets being each members individual score also. We would be ranked in order of score, and then be asked to collect whatever we wanted on our turn to choose.

I would like to make the overclocking  the focus of the second half of this coverage, so that neatly brings an end to the first part. I have put a few photos in the text of this blog, but I will put a few more at the bottom, so please scroll down to see a few more shots of the event.

See you soon for the second half of the coverage.