After the small in brief by Slamms and Adeline, the contestants could pick up the hardware according a number they had drawn before. Per team two Rampage V Extreme motherboards, two GTX 980 Strix cards, two sets of Corsair Quad channel memory, Two Corsair SSDs, two Corsair AX1200i PSUs and finally pick one Intel i7-5960X processor per tray.  The contestants didn't know this particular info: one tray contained decent processors (read 4500 at +/- 1.35VCore), while tray two had lesser strong i7-5960X CPUs. One of the latter couldn't even boot into the Win7 Operating System at 4500MHz at 1.45Vcore. Imagine cashing 1000 dollars for such a dud processor :(

Since the teams only had about an hour and a half to get everything ready for some serious LN2 action, some binning had to be done straight away. Most Teams just placed the CPU pot without any mount on top of the processor and tried to boot as high as possible into the Operating System. One minor problem was straight discovered: most of the Teams weren't able to boot into the Windows 7 OS, not even at default, while booting into Windows 8 was no biggie at all. Slamms first adjusted some Bios settings, though couldn't make the setup of XA and Giorgioprimo stable. A quick and swift decision was made: thus only Windows 8 was going to be used, but with the limitation that for the 2D stage, the Teams had to prove they didn't adjust the BClock in the OS. So after the score was validated, one reboot had to be done to make sure the Bclock ran was set in the Bios.

The different manners of insulation was huge: some prefer erazor gum, other just tons of vaseline, some used liquid tape and loads of tissue paper. No matter how they insulated their hardware, no teams had experienced heavy condensation issues during the 8 hour hardcore benching marathon.

Per team we saw one member prepping the motherboard, binning the processor and dialing in the Vengeance LPX memory. The other member was charged with prepping and volt modding the GTX 980 card. These were also binned by the teams, mostly based on the possible GPU memory clocks. Team 7 had an unlucky card as it couldn't do 2000Mhz memory speed stable without capping out.

Many teams did some initial testing at home with similar hardware, though another surprise awaited them at the event itself. Corsair has swapped the Hynix ICs to Samsung ones on the Vengeance 2800C16 LPX kit. As the teams were pretty time limited almost no one dialed in the memory properly. Go figure that on some boards the kit didn't even boot from XMP profile. Initial thoughts on this new revision seemed more a move backwards for Corsair than a step forward.