When Intel Extreme Masters came back to Sydney for the first time since 2019, it came back hard. Over 20,000 fans attended the Counter-Strike 2 tournament in the Aware Super Th💧eatre, making it both the largest and fastest-selling Australian esports tournament in history. That was just for the in-person attendance — online, the tournament saw a peak of over 460,000 viewers and a combined 6.6 million hours watched according to .
This was also the first major tournament for the recently re꧋leased Counter-Strike 2, marking a big milestone for the franchi♑se.. In total, 16 ESL teams came together to face off in the new game and compete for a $250,000 prize pool.
Intel also debuted its new Intel® Core™ 14th gen desktop processors. To celebrate the new CPU line, overclockers took the stage at IEM Sydney 2023 and pushed the top-of-the-line Intel Core i9 processor 14900K to insane levels. Overclockers Team AU used 𒅌liquid nitrogen to keep the chip cool while running all of its Performance cores at a whopping 8GHz, fast enough to see the average framerate in Counter-Strike 2 land between 900 and꧟ 1,300 FPS — time for some new gaming monitors, it seems.
IEM Sydney will be followed by IEM Katowice 2024 from February 9-11 in Poland, then IEM China 2024༒ from April 11-14.
