HWCooling Techtour 2024 (SPŠT Martin)
The old cinema hall of the Secondary Industrial Technical School in Martin has come to life again. On the occasion of the world premiere of Intel Core Ultra/Arrow Lake processors and Gigabyte Z890 motherboards, we organized expert lectures for the students and they could also physically see the hardware on site. In addition, they demonstrated their knowledge and also their excellent skills in mounting coolers on a CPU.
On 22 October 2024, the largest room at SPŠT Martin was filled with computer hardware. The main stars were Intel Arrow Lake processors and Gigabyte Z890 motherboards. The students of the technical industrial school were thus among the first in the world to see this hardware, and to make it all make sense, they also came away enriched by the expertise imparted to them directly by Intel and Gigabyte employees. This is definitely something that is probably missing not only in our (Slovak) education system – to have first-hand information. We managed to hold the event in a really professional spirit, which means that the presentations were technical (without marketing elements). This was one of our conditions.
After the opening “face-off” (directed by me), it started with Intel’s lecture on the new Core Ultra 200S processors. Then, after a break, during which the students were mostly busy at the booths with physical samples of processors and motherboards (Z890), the Gigabyte block followed. This related to the Z890 motherboards.
Students of SPŠT Martin were very active during the lectures, as the largest number of interactions meant winning a Intel Core Ultra 5 245K processor. And in addition, a qualification for the skills competition. The three most active students who would then install an Aorus Waterforce II 360I liquid cooler on a processor were selected to participate. If the installation was done correctly, time was of the essence – the fastest one won. Both the cooler itself and the Z890 Aorus Elite WiFi7 Ice motherboard. The winner was a student who, just like at SOŠ Žilina, was also the most active in the knowledge competition, so he went home from school with a significant part of a whole computer build. At least, if we convert it into money – the processor, the cooler and the motherboard were quite expensive.
And in order to have some comparison, it should be noted that the students at SPŠT Martin were significantly faster than those at SOŠE Žilina. All of them managed to install the cooler within 12–13 minutes. In Žilina it was up to 29–37 minutes.
Martin was the second of a total of three stops. On Tuesday – 22 October 2024 – we are also looking forward to seeing the students and teachers in Liptovský Hrádok at the Secondary Vocational School of Electrical Engineering.
We would like to thank the following companies for their cooperation in the events: Intel, Gigabyte (Aorus), Datacomp, Axagon, Sony, Jama Levova, I See IT and Kingston. And also thanks to SPŠT Martin, for preparing a table with a display of historical processors and motherboards, among other things.
English translation and edit by Jozef Dudáš
