similarities between competitive
gaming and overclocking are
more than skin deep and in
structure these two activities
are by and large very similar.
Where hardware is
concerned, MSI had a very
strong showing this year with
not a single piece of hardware
failing due to overclocking. As
usual there is some hardware
that for some reason or another
exhibits odd behavior, like a
particular SSD as used by the
Russian overclocker Xtreme
Addict. For some reason Super
Pi would not run successfully
on this drive which obviously
ended his day prematurely. This
was the only hardware glitch
that was encountered outside of
regular extreme overclocking
challenges. The involved
vendors in the competition,
provided not only solid and
reliable hardware, but ensured
that each entrant had two
sets of hardware, in case one
component failed unexpectedly.
The hardware for the
competition was none other than
MSI’s Z97 MPower motherboard,
the Intel Core i7 4790K, Cooler
Master’s brilliant V1200
platinum and JETFLO 120mm
fans. The memory of choice
was G.Skill’s TRIEDNTX F3 CL10
2600. KINGSTON’s HYPERX
3K SSDs, VIEWSONIC’s
VX2370SMH LED monitors
along with keyboards and mice
by SteelSeries completed the
hardware list. The graphics
cards of choice were the sublime
MSI GTX 980 GAMING and the
very rare, GeForce GTX 780 Ti
Lightning MOA edition. During
the competition only the 780Ti
Lightning could be used for the
3D Benchmark, but after the
Issue 32 | 2014 The OverClocker 13