DreamHack 2005 is behind us now. Yet another event and as usual NordicHardware was there to make the staying for all 7500 visitors an experience they would never forget.
Once again NordicHardware attended DreamHack. After so many years we have started to almost feel like a part of the scenery, which perhaps wouldn’t be all that bad as we will be there for so many more events. You have been able to follow the events here on the front page through our news, even if you can hardly say that it is the same thing as being there at DH and see it with your own eyes.
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The number of visitors at DreamHack Winter 2005 was over 7500 and we have to say it really showed that there were more people than usual there. We were constantly occupied from day one when they opened until Saturday night when people started to calm and prepare for the trip home and we hope that you had as much fun as we had.
Wednesday started with building our very own booth. As this event had attracted more attendants than usual we had for some odd reason to “suffice” with regular tables instead of having to build our own from pellets and boards, which you can see on the picture to left below. We smiled politely and kindly accepted.
 Our booth before the builders had arrived |
 Builder 1 and builder 2, also known as Bogus^ and Mean Machine |
You who where there or checked out our DHW 2005 site knows that during this even Robert “Crotale” Kihlberg would do some overclocking. We had a compressor available capable of holding a temperature of -100°C on-die and he would later show off what you can do with such a thing. We of course brought tons of prices as well, among others video cards from XFX.
 Robert’s toy |
 Emmy presents one of our prizes |
With everything at place we just had to dress the walls with the right colors and of course somehow set up our “beloved” banner. It may be beautiful, some even say wonderful , but it is not easy to get it in place.
 Your’s truly assisted by Crotale puts up the banner |
 Builder 2 and your’s truly dress the booth |
After a lot of work we where finally done and were in fact quite happy with the result, unfortunately no good picture of that, this year, but that much thanks to the very nice LCD monitor we had paired to our projector.
As the last even we had our support where the closet used to be at the big entrance. The white metal hangers you see in the background somehow felt lighter than last year, in some weird way. Maybe it was because of the anticipation of what that was about to come or that we have simply gotten used to dragging the dealies back and forth.
 The people waiting for getting their computers fixed |
 To begin with things were pretty calm |
As usual there were some things we will never forget from working with the support. This time it’s most likely the guy who forgot to remove the plastic protection from his cooler before applying paste and mounting it. And of course how our CEO manages to make the integrated audio output to stop working when just switching chassi. Everything else worked fine, but no sound. Both of these was of course fixed, with good results. Not to forget is he who brought his computer after having tried to install Windows twice but still couldn’t get it to work. It took a whole lot of work to make it work, but damn it, it worked to 100% when it left the support.
 Some errors appear different from others |
 Teamwork |
It wasn’t just in the support where there were constant work, but people didn’t hesitate to come down to our booth to check our the majestic monitor and pretty big compressor system we had for display.
 Some gaming on our nice monitor |
 Some tweaking |
The tweaking was done before the actual overclocking attempt that would happen later the same evening. A Pentium 4 660 at 3.6GHz would be overclocked to 6GHz, unfortunately we bumped into trouble but nothing we couldn’t fix. And if you followed our news you saw that he did manage with the task.
Just as the last event where a Celeron D was clocked to over 5GHz, we had a competition where the visitors could guess how far the processor would go. The last time we used dry ice, but this time Robert had brought his new compressor cascade to play with.
 Inspection |
 Closer inspection |
A cascade requires just as dry ice, a lot of preparations and you have to spend a lot of time and energy to get a good overclock. Several mountings, a lot of grease or other isolation to protect from the condensation and not to forget the paste.
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After placing some fans on strategic spots the overclocking can start.
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After a lot of tweaking and a new motherboard from Abit we reached 6GHz.
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Bunguru Wa made its last performance as a contest in our booth this DH. Our projector together with Viewsonic’s 27" LCD gave a pretty nice impression. The perhaps worst thing about it was that the players had to keep turning their heads back and forth all the time to keep up.
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As usual it was a close contest, closer than ever actually. We had six people who were over 124,000 points, where Filip Eklöf was the best with 140,000. The first prize consisted of a XFX GeForce 7800 GT eXTreme, the second prize was a XFX Xgear Headset "MindQuake" and XFX Xgear Game Controller and the third prize was a XFX Xgear Game Controller. So there was definitely a lot of prizes to be won and it actually seemed like a nerve wrecking contest for some of the finalists..
 1st place Erik Karlsson |
 2nd place Timo Laituri |
 3rd place Christian Remle |
After placing fourth in for the final Erik managed to do a good last round while Christian and Filip didn’t have the same luck at all, so he managed to get past them in the final, but also Timo who got beat with just a few points. Christian managed to steal the third place though, despite that the last round didn’t go really as planned.
| Name | Points |
| Erik Karlsson | 262 150 |
| Timo Laituri | 259 709 |
| Christian Remle | 175250 |
For this DH we chose to try out a replacement for Bunguru Wa which we feel has done its part for us and DH. We will of course miss it, but we feel that you’re actually getting too good. We started gently with some Icy Tower.
 Crusader in extacy over Icy Tower |
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Even if we knew that Icy Tower is by no means a new game, or an unknown one, we got a bit surprised when we saw how good the contestants were. We did not expect such even results and unfortunately we might have to rethink if this is the right game to have, for the next DH.
 1st place Erik Elmeke |
 2nd place Jesper Engdahl |
 3rd place Johan Edman |
Erik went home with an AOpen XC Cube EA65-II, while Jesper and Johan got an AOpen XRecorder VX2000 respectively an AOpen MVP Player.
We had quite a few contests for this DH and in addition to the always appreciated Bunguru Wa contest and the Icy Tower candidate, we had two more contests. This DH we had a special contest together with Antec where the first prize was their famous P180. We received pretty many contributions, but liked these five more than the rest.
 2nd place |
 3rd place |
 1st place |
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 4th place |
 5th place |
As we mentioned before the winner walked home with an Antec P180, but the others didn’t walk home with empty hands (second to fourth prize):: Antec Sonata II, Antec Aria, Antec NeoHE 430 and Antec NeoHE 380.
 2nd place David Lundwall |
 3rd place Fredrik Östman |
 1st place Mattias Hidendahl |
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 4th place Jonas Hjelm |
 5th place Ronny Ohlsson |
Just like last summer Crotale was on the set, this time with an even more extreme cooling than last, to overclock a Pentium 4 660. The contest was simply to guess as close as possible at much Crotale could overclock that Pentium chip. Our dear users underestimated our dear overclocking guru though since the highest bid was at 5925MHz when Robert actually reached 6009MHz. The man who guessed closest was no other than Peter Billing. For this qualified guess he received a Corsair Cool Water Cooling kit worth 2000SEK.
 The happiest attendee this DreamHack, without doubt. |
Another DreamHack finished, four days of bad sleep, hundreds of people who’d been in need of help and a couple of hundred-kronor notes poorer you can finally begin to rehabilitate for the normal life.
 Since your author had the pleasure to put up the banner Woxxman got the honor to take it down. |
We hope that you have had a good time because we sure did! If you didn’t have the opportunity to attend this DreamHack don’t worry, you will have more chances since our plans for DreamHack extends to many events in the future. We will be there if it’s raining, sunny, cold or hot without demonstrations and contests to make our best effort to give you guys a great time!
