A Polish high school is turning PC hardware overclocking into a serious competitive arena, and its next big event is right around the corner. ZSEM OC CUP III is scheduled for April 10, 2026, and it’s set to bring together dozens of students aiming to push PC components to their limits in a fast-paced, record-chasing tournament hosted at ZSEM High School.
This year’s competition is shaping up to be the largest yet. According to organizer and teacher Tomasz Mąka, students will compete primarily in teams of two, with a few choosing to run solo. In total, 25 teams are expected to participate, battling across eight stages to see who can extract the best performance and post the highest scores.
While the tournament hasn’t produced a national or world record so far, the group is reportedly getting closer with each edition. The ambition is clearly growing alongside the results, and the long-term plan is even bigger: the school is targeting an international edition in 2027.
One of the most interesting aspects of ZSEM OC CUP III is how it’s being built from the ground up. The event is currently supported mainly by local Polish companies, with the team working to increase visibility among major hardware vendors over time. That grassroots backing is helping keep the tournament moving forward—and it’s also making the prize pool more exciting for students who put their components on the line.
Last time, winners took home highly relevant PC-building gear like a Ryzen 5 9600X processor, a GeForce RTX 4060 graphics card, an AIO liquid cooler, and a power supply. This year, the rewards shift toward big mainstream gaming prizes: first place is set to receive a PlayStation 5, second place an Xbox Series S, and third place a Nintendo Switch. It’s a smart way to keep the stakes high and the motivation even higher for students spending hours tweaking settings and chasing stable, top-tier results.
Overclocking itself is not part of the school’s official curriculum—at least not yet. Instead, it’s run as an extracurricular activity led by Mąka, who says his goal is simple: bring new people into the overclocking scene and give students hands-on exposure to high-performance computing. He’s not just supervising from the sidelines, either. He’s an experienced overclocker with a strong national standing, ranking third in Poland, which gives the students access to serious knowledge about benchmarking, tuning, stability testing, and real-world enthusiast workflows.
For anyone who wants to watch the action unfold, the event will be livestreamed on April 10, 2026, running from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM CET. Coverage is planned primarily on YouTube, with an additional stream possibly running on Twitch as well. The competition will focus largely on CPU overclocking, and there are no restrictions on cooling methods—meaning participants can use anything from conventional setups to more extreme approaches, as long as they can keep their components stable while pushing for the best results.
With every team bringing their own hardware and accepting the risks that come with intense overclocking stress, ZSEM OC CUP III highlights a rare mix of education, competition, and genuine enthusiast culture. If vendor support grows, the tournament could become a standout pipeline for young talent in PC building, performance tuning, and competitive benchmarking—starting in one school, but with clear potential to reach a much larger stage.
