CES 2011 Coverage

MSI MOA (Master Overclocking Arena) 2011 Americas Finals

What would CES be without a huge overclocking event and, of course, some liquid nitrogen (LN2)? This year, MSI brought its MOA (Master Overclocking Arena) 2011 to the CES masses with the Americas Finals. The top ten teams from North and South America came together to compete for the chance at the World Finals to be held in Taiwan along with a nice cash prize for the top three spots. There were a total of twenty contestants in the tournament grouped in to the ten respective teams. The event was also broadcast live over the Internet to thousands that were not able to attend.

The participating overclockers were Patch and Dentlord for Team Over the Edge from the US, Splave and Romdominace for Team OCAlliance from the US, Rbuass and Fugger for Team 1213 Xtreme from Brazil, Grindaol and Joe90br for Team 1213 Overclocking Team from Brazil, chew* and ZenEffect for Team XS from the US, GHZ and Gautam for Team PURE from the US, steponz and Kal-EL for Team Overclockaholics from the US, Brian y. and Chris for Team Overclockers Anonymous from the US, Robert and ocgmj for Team Vaseline from the US, and finally E-Killer and Nestorky for Team Hardcol from Columbia. To keep the soldiers in line, there were staff commanders on site to monitor everything.

Each team had a set type and number of components that were provided to the contestants at the event and even some prior, such as a motherboard and video card. The contestants could tweak what they needed, within limits - they were not allowed to make any modifications to the BIOS code of the motherboards or the VGA cards. They were also not allowed to use any hardware or software not provided by MSI for the event, including Flash Drives, hard drives, or DVD/CD drives. There were two rounds of testing. The first was for the CPU, which consisted of the fastest 32M SuperPi score. The second focused more on graphics, with the highest 3DMark 11 score. The hardware that was provided, as well as tweaking tools, included:

With the contestants on site, they were hard at work trying to get the best scores they could out of the weapons provided to them. There was some extreme overclocking going on with some really cold temps. At one point, we overheard one of the teams, Team Over the Edge, had the voltage on their processor up to 1.95v, which helped pay off since they had a hard score to beat in SuperPi 32M. The teams were stressing the hardware to the brink and it was a joy to watch. Once they were set up and running, there was no holding back. Along with the temperatures and voltages we were seeing, this contest was no holds barred.