ty_ger07
The great thing about hwbot is the leveling of playfield and hardware only competing against like hardware. It's not most expensive against most expensive, but tiered instead.
In this country cup though, it appears not to be tiered. Correct me if I am wrong. If it isn't tiered, a lot of people will not participate for that reason alone. It becomes pointless for them to even try.
Have you looked at the categories? There are a bunch of categories where newer and high end hardware is not allowed. Its mostly lower priced older hardware and everyone is competing against each other using the same older, lower priced hardware.
For example:
"AM5, EPYC CPUs or Threadripper platforms"
"Only use processors using socket FM2+, FM2 socket."
"Only use processors using socket 940, AM2 socket, 939 socket, 754 socket."
"No K, KS or KF SKU CPUs allowed. No dedicated graphics cards, IGPU must be used"
"Core I3 CPUs only"
"Core I5 CPU'S only, divided per socket. Only use DDR4 SDRAM memory."
I guess it depends on what exactly you mean by tiered, but everyone is restricted in hardware for most categories.
Even though Team USA would have likely swept one AMD CPU category with how many good overclocking Threadrippers their members have, one of the Team USA members even suggested not allowing Threadripper CPUs for one AMD category to reduce the cost of competition in that category.
There are a few categories that allow newer hardware, but they are smaller in number.