QA

with Giorgio Primo

Full Name: Massimiliano Calandrini Country: Italy What language(s) do you speak? I speak Italian (my mother tongue), English and Spanish. On which forums do you spend most of your time these days? nexthardware forum which is actually the best one focused on enthusiast hardware and overclocking in Italy, of course xtremesystems and hwbot. As far as overclocker rankings are concerned, do such things matter to you or do you overclocking purely for personal achievement? Well, I would define myself as a hardware freak. I mainly overclock for myself as competition adds a lot of salt to this sport. I really like the idea of competing with people from the other side of the world. The important thing is to focus on a target score, not just the highest one but to get a better score than another guy with the same hardware. When did your interest in overclocking start and how did it start? It was around 2004/2005 just trying to extract more power from my daily computer (ATI 9800 pro, AMD Mobile AthlonXP 2600+, Abit NF7) to play games. I then discovered
6 The OverClocker Issue 17 | 2011

water-cooling and phase-change at which point, I met two other guys, very crazy about hardware like me, Leghorn and Giampa. We joined together to form the memoryextreme team. HWbot didnt exist at that time and we used to produce scores just for the ORB at Futuremark and on a Japanese site about superpi (rip something....).Going from phase change to LN2 was really fast. At that time, we were the leaders in the OC community in Italy and the competition was directly with Kingpin, Hipro5, Kinc and Shamino. After a good few years spent together, Giampa was increasingly more involved with his website (nexthardware.com) and leghorn was too busy with his work. I stopped for a while, but then I started over again and Im still here. There are a lot of

new good guys out there and I think Im one of the oldest, but I still like to push hardware over the limit. What is your single greatest or most memorable overclocking achievement ever? I really cannot say which one, I feel pretty good every time i beat the guy that stands before me, every time I get a really nice run. Every time I get a session, I have a new target and if I can reach it....well, that becomes my newest, greatest achievement What was your favourite era in overclocking and how has it changed since the early days? About 4-5 years ago, (the AMD FX A64 age) overclocking was a kind of esoteric sport, very few people used to partake in it. Everything

was new and difficult, me with the memoryextreme team used to look at Hipro5, Shamino, kingpin, and the Japanese Team with a lot of attentiveness in the hopes of improving our skills. I remember the first pots, the first way to insulate hardware, lots of time spent on vmodding hardware.....I miss those days, but maybe its just because Im old and because every single thing was pretty new for me.(I suspect youre not the only one in this regard Ed!) Now everything is much more pro and competitive. Manufacturers build hardware specially made for overclocking, and everybody tries to get the best CPU and VGA, spending a whole lot of money to bin them. That is all competition, it is still exciting for me, but you know, i prefer the old days.

Which is your most favourite benchmark if any and what is your least favourite and why? My most favourite is 3dmark Vantage because you need to tweak a lot; Im obviously talking about hardware tweaking. You need a strong CPU, strong GPU and if you run quad SLI you really need to be a master to control it all during the different tests. My least favourite is AM3, probably because i never really got a good score in it. Whats your current platform of choice for your overclocking? I play with different platforms at the moment. To be in the PRO league, you need to be versatile, SandyBridge with p67, Gulftown and x58. I have also started testing X79 with SandyBridge-E.

I would also like to get a go at the new AMD bulldozer. For video cards I put a lot of effort in pushing the GTX580 to its limits. What is your current take on online Futuremark or HWBOT overclocking competitions? Do you think they are helping to grow overclocking or are they dividing the overclocking scene? This is a difficult question. I used to overclocking for fun and yes, to compete with other people. Futuremark was the company that grew the overclocking scene, so a round of applause to them for starting this. Hwbot pushed the overclocking community in another direction, put a lot of effort in building a fair playing field for competing and bringing overclocking to more people.
2011 | Issue 17 The OverClocker 7

Having judged several high profile live overclocking competitions, if you had it your way, what would you change at live events if anything at all? The CPU binning process, to get 30 CPUs for the contestants, i think thats 300 CPUs that need to be tested on LN2 just to give to the contestants a truly homogeneous group of samples. That is what makes the competition more unbiased, finding CPUs which have no more than 50MHz between them. What was your favourite live competition of all time and what made it stand out from the others? MOA, because it is huge, it is really a championship with a selection all over the world that gains you access to the grand finale. It is a big investment made by MSI to the OC community to all. What do you consider as the future of overclocking? It will change; the approach to overclocking is dependent on the evolution of the platforms. However there will still be a lot of people which will enjoy pushing the different platforms over the limit. I cant imagine though the evolution of the OC community. It is growing and I would like it to became bigger and bigger. I hope that manufacturers will continue to have an interest in the OC community and develop even tighter relationships with it. Do you think there will ever be a time where you lose all interest in overclocking? No. With the current platforms (at least from INTEL) it seems the quality of the CPU (in terms of max multiplier) is the most important factor and in a way causing people to bin CPUs for multi more than ever before. Has this killed the tweaking element of overclocking to you? Depends, If your goal is to shoot for the top 10 in Hwbot, then yes, a great CPU is a requirement, but if you like to show your skills in terms of efficiency, its not so important. Besides that, the last three months
8 The OverClocker Issue 17 | 2011

were really busy for the community in an attempt to find a better way to bench the 580 lightning and this is still tweaking, hardware tweaking. A lot of skill and time is needed to bench this beast in the right way. So essentially no, even with a great CPU, you need to be a really good overclocker to produce solid results, this fine tuning and tweaking is still needed to be at the top of the hill. What would like to say manufacturers as a whole who are reading this? Sometime be a little smarter and sometimes foolish. Just try different things, be less rational and more instinctive, be PIRATES. (Im not an APPLE fan, but Steve Jobs was a fucking genius). Is there anything you would like to extend to the community and other readers? Overclocking is fun, so try to get this thing on the fun level. It is not your real life, its just something that should help you relax, so, dont take it too serious. Do it with a lot of effort, but have fun. If you start to feel overclocking is something that you have to do, then just leave it.

At the end of 2011, what technologies are you looking forward to in 2012? New, upcoming tablets? LOL Outside of overclocking, what else are you as passionate about and spent an equal amount of time if not more doing? I really like motorbikes and cars. On the other side, food and wine but I dont spend so much time on them like on overclocking and computer stuff. What do you do for a living and what does your typical day look like? I work as a sales-manager for a wine company in Italy. Every day is different for me; I dont have a fixed program. I travel all around Italy to help my sales-man and visit my customers so; quite often I leave from my house for two, three days or even a full week. Other days I stay at home to do office-work and sometimes I work on weekends. Free time to dedicate to computing and overclocking is limited and usually during the evenings of my weekends or during my vacation (night and day).