I’ve often referred to Tom’s Hardware when researching components and optimum configurations for PC’s. It’s a site that provides the news and reviews necessary to fuel the obsessive tweaking and overclocking techniques employed by frenzied hardware freaks. So it seems hardly surprising when a columinst at the site considers extending overclocking benchmarks to the human body:

As IT professionals, we all appreciate the value of optimized hardware, the best, tweaked software, and the cleanest code. When a computer is slow, we inject it with a new lease on life by giving it more RAM or a better graphics card, or perhaps by overclocking the processor a bit. All that is great for the computer - but what happens then to us poor professionals, who have to slave from early morning until late in the night on these energetic beasts?

There comes a point in every programmer’s life when the strings and tags no longer make sense, the eyes feel heavy and the fingers numb upon the keyboard. We here at THG appreciate how the daily wear and tear takes its toll on the human body. Just as we believe that with enough liquid nitrogen anyone can go to 6 GHz and beyond, we believe that you too can be given an energy boost to take you through those long crunch nights. You know, the ones when the spit has hit the fan, you’re a day off deadline and have to go hunting for a single tiny bug in 100,000 lines of code?

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Over the course of the last few weeks we’ve had to reinvent the wheel, developing the highest quality benchmarks to precisely calculate which beverage is the best suited to fulfilling your needs. In true THG style, we’ve come up with several highly advanced and technical tests, from the “How sick do I feel after drinking this stuff?” questionnaire to the “How much productivity is lost due to running back and forth between the bathroom and your desk?” metric.

My personal favourite, Tea, is deemed “the best drink for those seeking to wake themselves up without getting abnormally high.” Further, Tea is benchmarked pretty low on the jolt and crash scales, thus helping me feel somewhat less insecure about my relatively mild caffiene addiction.