As we are halfway through the last term of the 2023 to 2024 academic year I’d like to spend some time to show what this club looked like 8 years ago and its humble beginnings.

Overview

OSU Overclocking was founded as a competition-based outlet for students interested in electronics packaging and thermal management. The founders identified a need for students who wanted experiential learning opportunities that would directly enable them to be impactful in tech jobs on day one. The club was designed to meet students at the nexus of learning fundamental electronics packaging/thermal management principles, competitive computer overclocking, and the enjoyment of building your own high performance gaming rig. A priority at the outset and even now is highlighting students to potential employers through not only our world record breaking performances in computer overclocking but also through travel and exposition booths at major conferences including ITherm and NEDME

History

What is now the OSU Overclcokcing Club started in the 2016-17 school year with Matt Harrison leading it who registered it as Beaver Overdrive with IEEE. The club was pretty much only on paper and it was setup and organzied but was not active in overclocking until next year under Dr. Gess related too the Enhanced Heat Transfer Lab.

Moving into the 2017-18 school year things started to take off where the club was opened up to the general student body. Shown below is the 15 memembers that made up that group. The team got its hands on it first set of CPU’s from Intel which gave us a batch of 8700k’s and 8600k’s.

Dr. Gess would go on to lock everyone in his office with him (very scary) in order for leadership roles to be given in order to establish the club. During 2018 the clubs first immersion system was completed, which focused on immersing a open cpu die with thermo fluid.

At this time the team primarily focused on air and liquid cooling with some more extreme attempts being done on dry ice. The team went on a trip to Intel’s overclocking team which allowed them to try LN2 Overclocking for the first time. The team mostly did internal compititions against each other and every once in awhile would venture to HWBot in order to compete against those around the world. The team would go on to compete in teh GSkill compition that year and place in the top 25 using the 9900k.

2019 would be a big year for the club seeing it break past the 7Ghz barrier, as well as some members going to Las Vegas to present at an IEEE event. This year also saw the club getting access to LN2, which opened up the potential of alot of our already great performing chips.

Then Covid happened. The club did a move halfway through to Graf Hall where the club was in a room that was used to house steam equipment and wind tunnel in the middle of the room, the highest temp recorded in that room was 105 degrees Fahrenheit.

During this time isring 2022 year they got windows XP working on a modern system at the time, as well as making a custom macro that would open all the tabs needed for a screenshot to submit to hwbot. Unfortunetaly that was lost to time, however we did get a large donation of DDR4 RAM from Micron.

That leads us today where we have done quite the comeback from Covid where we are now sponsored by Intel and ASUS and have met with the Top Overclockers in the world. We take all of this good fortune to heart and try to push the hardware we are given to the max and use the skills we picked up from Elmor and Skatterbencher to their fullest. We do still kill things from time to time but now we have the support of the teams at ASUS and Intel who we cant thank enough. This allows our members to persue interdiciplinary projects such as our own heated LN2 Pot, a custom pot that uses a leidenfrost reducing element, custom software development, custom 3d printed cases, as well as the further development and iterations of immersion type systems. All of this being done while pushing hardware to its limits, here is to 8 great years and for many more.

• Recognition