This year’s contest involves five separate challenges or sub-competitions as we refer to them, each with an historical epoch in mind. Contest categories include Current Generation, Modern, Legacy, Vintage and Dogpile. Let’s look at the stages in more detail regarding specific hardware limitations and benchmarks.

Team Cup 2016 (Jul 1 - Sep 30): Sub-Competitions and Stages

SC1: Current Gen (DDR4)

• Stage 1: SuperPI 1M - Skylake/Haswell (Average of 3 best CPUs)
• Stage 2: 3DMark11 Full Out - GeForce 600/700
• Stage 3: HWBOT Prime - Mobile Haswell/Skylake (Average of 3 best CPUs)
• Stage 4: Geekbench3 Multi Core - Steamroller
• Stage 5: 3DMark Fire Strike Extreme - Radeon HD 7000 + Rx2/3 rebrand (Average of 3 best GPUs)
• Stage 6: GPUPI for CPU 1B - Haswell E
• Stage 7: Memory Clock - DDR4

SC2: Modern Gen (DDR3)

• Stage 1: XTU - Ivy Bridge/Sandy Bridge (Average of 3 best CPUs)
• Stage 2: Vantage 2x GPU - GeForce 500/400
• Stage 3: GPUPI for CPU 100M - Mobile Sandy Bridge / Ivy Bridge (Average of 3 best CPUs)
• Stage 4: 3DMark11 Physics - Piledriver/Bulldozer
• Stage 5: Unigine Extreme - Radeon HD 6000/5000 (Average of 3 best GPUs)
• Stage 6: HWBOT x265 1080P - Sandy Bridge-E
• Stage 7: Memory Clock - DDR3

SC:3 Legacy (DDR2)

• Stage 1: PiFast - Socket 775 (Average of 3 best CPUs)
• Stage 2: 3DMark03 - NetBurst 775 + GeForce 9000/8000 (Average of 3 best CPUs)
• Stage 3: Wprime 1024 - Mobile Core/NetBurst
• Stage 4: 3DMark06 2x GPU - K10 + HD 3000 (Average of 3 best GPUs)
• Stage 5: 3DMark Vantage - K10 + HD 2000
• Stage 6: CPU Frequency - AM2
• Stage 7: Memory Clock - DDR2

SC4: Vintage (DDR1)

• Stage 1: Wprime32 - NetBurst 478 (Average of 3 best GPUs)
• Stage 2: Aquamark - NetBurst + GeForce 6000
• Stage 3: SuperPi 1M - Mobile Intel w/DDR1
• Stage 4: 3DMark05 - Socket 939 + Radeon R500 (Average of 3 best GPUs)
• Stage 5: Cinebench2003 - Socket 754
• Stage 6: 3DMark99 - Socket 462+GeForce 5000
• Stage 7: Memory Clock - DDR1 (Average of 3 best scores)

SC5: Dogpile

• Stage 1: HWBOT Prime - CPU must be different
• Stage 2: 3DMark01 - GPUs must be different

As you can see from the list above, this year’s Team Cup is as mammoth as ever. Just to clarify a few things. The nomenclature (3S) indicates that the final team score will in fact be an average of the top three scores submitted. The ‘Dogpile’ round involves teams making as many submissions as possible with scores added together to make a total score. Only score per CPU/GPU allowed, so it’s all about digging out and scoring on as many different CPUs/GPUs as possible.