Trials and tribulation
When it came time for the official event to begin, the stage lit up again and the announcers detailed how the different stages would play out.

The announcers did a great job keeping the level high for all the spectators

There was also some time for executives from companies who had donated equipment to briefly talk about their work and support for events such as this one.

The sponsors underscored their support for the event

Of course, the competitors couldn't be bothered to pay too much attention as they hurried to get equipment prepared for the first round of benchmarking.

Meanwhile, some teams were looking at this

As if system assembly and modification weren't difficult enough, time constraints forced some teams to simplify their approaches in order to post scores in the first round.

Korea's team didn't get its GPU cooled by liquid nitrogen until a little later

By this time, most teams had setups at least ready to start, and the liquid nitrogen was flowing freely. Several members of Gigabyte's staff worked almost non-stop filling insulated jugs with LN2 directly from the tanks.

Pouring liquid nitrogen makes for quite a show in itself

Although the primary goal of most contestants was to get the CPU as cold as possible, often times that pursuit caused an entirely different problem.

What's a torch doing at an event all about getting things cold?

Due to what's known as the "cold bug," most CPUs will simply freeze up and stop working entirely if their temperatures plunge too low.

A creme brulée torch makes fine desserts and keeps your processor at an optimal temperature, too

The cold bug is especially tricky because you don't know what temperature a processor will bottom out at until you hit it. Most teams that ran into this problem encountered it more than once when trying to pin down whether their systems were freezing because the processor wasn't cold enough or because it was too cold.

Sweden took its sweet time applying adhesive foam in multiple layers

Some teams spent a lot more time prepping their hardware before diving into the software side of things.

Team USA-2 was cruising along pretty nicely considering all the work they did on their equipment

For those teams who weren't as far along, the time was running out to get their systems up and running.

Team USA-1 was particularly short on time

The pre-fitted foam team USA-1 brought wasn't enough to counteract the time it took to perform all their intensive mods.

Energy in a can

It would have been easy to slow down at this point, considering the discouraging feeling that comes from not being sure if you'll have everything ready on time, but an abundance of Red Bull helped to keep everyone going.