A bird’s eye-view of the arena. Pretty slick!
Fifteen teams, thirteen countries, a copious
amount of LN2 and some of the best
hardware money can buy. This is MSI’s
Master Overclocking Arena.
These are
lasers (no these
are lights in
the shape of,
nevermind!) and
this is a man with
lights on him, as
would be a 70s
robot. Stylin!
A girl.
W
here there
was once
several live
overclocking
events on
the calendar,
there is
now but one
and if there’s anything to infer from
that. It’s that MSI is truly dedicated
to overclocking and the overclocking
community in a way few or no other
vendor is. A bold statement, but then
again, it’s a monumental undertaking
organizing a live overclocking
competition. For five years straight,
overclockers from all over the world
have been gathering in Taipei Taiwan to
battle it out for not only prizes, money
and fame, but the title of being that
respective year’s MOA Champion. A
title that I believe is worth more than
the prize money in some ways.
This year was easily the best year of
the competition and for some reason it
coincided with this year’s Mr.Olympia
2012 contest all the way across the
globe in Las Vegas Nevada. This little
coincidence made it a little more
special for us here at TheOverclocker
or at least for me.
The arena was familiar, as had
been the tradition since the first
competition; The National Taiwan
University was the contest ground for
this year’s competition. This is where
MSI would host the most extreme
competition of the year, and easily the
biggest overclocking competition of
the year as well.
THE GEAR
With so much Z77 overclocking taking
place, one would have assumed that
this would have been the platform
for choice for MSI. After all, the Z77
MPower board (reviewed in this issue)
had been available for retail already
and if high clock speeds and big
numbers were the intention, this was
the platform to choose.
Well, it turns out the platform was
actually X79. That’s right; INTEL’s most
expensive desktop platform was the
platform selected.. MSI may have had
their reasons for this, but we sort of
figured why this made sense on our
own or at least it was probably the best
decision made in any live overclocking
competition.
See, with X79 as you may know,
the CPU plays the biggest part. This
is true for any single platform, but
no other ecosystem has this kind of
Issue 21 | 2012 The OverClocker 33