Following up on my last post (which honestly got way more attention than I expected xD), I wanted to share how the third edition of the ZSEM OC CUP went. It wrapped up yesterday and it was by far the biggest one yet.
This time it basically turned into a national event. We had students coming from all over Poland and the turnout was insane: the sports hall was completely full the entire day. Compared to last year, we even stepped things up with a proper stage, lighting, and space for presentations and announcements. It actually felt like a real tech event, not just a school competition.
Participation-wise, we had about twice as many competitors as last year. And yeah, even two elementary school students showed up to compete which was honestly awesome to see.
The prize pool also went kind of crazy this year. There were full consoles like a PS5 Slim, Xbox Series S, and Switch OLED. On top of that, sponsors provided things like 1000W Supremo PSUs, Fortis 5 ARGB coolers, benchtables, peripherals, and even full motherboard + CPU + RAM bundles.
We also had some of the top Polish overclockers come in again and do extreme OC with LN2, which was just as wild to watch as before. Meanwhile in the main competition, people were either pushing hardware to the absolute limit or doing the opposite – downclocking and tuning for specific categories.
One of the funniest things this year was a completely unexpected sponsor story.
Our teacher (the same one who got us into all this) has this running joke where he posts his HWBOT overclocking submissions with a can of peas in the photo. It somehow became a meme in the OC community. So he decided to email the company that makes those canned peas, told them the whole story… and they actually loved it. They ended up sending us 140 cans of peas and even a banner for the event. So yeah, that's a lot of peas. Definitely not something I expected when we started doing OC competitions at school.
We also had a retro computing section, brought again by the same guy from last time ( u/maniek-86 ). He showed off a mix of classic systems like a Commodore 64, Macintosh Classic and LC II, plus a few old-school PCs (486, Windows 98 build, XP workstation and even an old Toshiba laptop running Windows 95). It was just a really cool, engaging display showing how hardware has evolved. At the end, he also did a short talk about repairing and bringing old machines back to life, which a lot of people stuck around for.
But except for his presentation, there were also other presentations given by other students throughout the day, such as:
– What killed Windows Phone
– How operating system design changed over time
– Weird trends in everyday devices
– Why game optimization sometimes fails
We also had some fun extras like live speedruns (Portal, Getting Over It), so there was always something going on even if you weren’t competing. And it was livestreamed on yt by the way.
Overall, the vibe was just really cool. Seeing a full sports hall of people from young kids to experienced overclockers, all in one place, talking about hardware, doing benchmarks and just generally the atmosphere, made all the work worth it.
Still kind of crazy that our school lets us do this, but I’m really glad they do. So, shout out to our teacher who helped us start this u/tomekmak_xoc!