We've heard of sticking keyboards in a dishwater to clean out the cruft (with mixed results), but motherboards, memory, and bare naked motherboards? Well, how else do you propose cleaning off the Vaseline?
This sounds like the setup to an April Fools' Day prank, but it's very real, and it has to do with an insane overclocking battle taking place on YouTube. Or as JayzTwoCents puts it, an overclocking beef (albeit a friendly one) between him, Bitwit, Gamers Nexus, Paul's Hardware, Linus Tech Tips, and now overclocking guru Der8auer.
The friendly battle was born out of Nvidia's GeForce RTX 2080 Ti graphics card. "What happens when NVIDIA Launches a GPU that really wasn't all that exciting? You overclock the hell out of it and see who can push theirs farther!," JayzTwoCents explains.
They're chasing 3DMark records, and the bragging rights that go along with them. That's pretty typical when new hardware is released. However, what's unique about this round of competition is that the participants are posting videos that detail some crazy setups.
The latest one to emerge is from Der8auer, and in it he explains how and why he uses a dishwasher to clean his components. For him, this has been the easiest way of removing the Vaseline that gets applied to areas of components to protect them from condensation.
He doesn't use any soap or detergent, just water. He notes that Vaseline melts at fairly low temperatures, and while he doesn't necessarily recommend trying this at home, he's apparently been using this method a long time with good success. Check it out:
Pretty wild, but it's really just the tip of the overclocking iceberg. JayzTwoCents uploaded a video showing his setup being cooled by an air conditioner blowing cold air into a carboard enclosure. Have a look:
There are more than a dozen videos with several hours of combined content, presumably with even more to come. Check it all out if you have time to kill, or just want to see how what kind of extremes the overclocking pros are will to go in pursuit of benchmarking records.
