MSI's Master Overclocking Arena starts tomorrow

So, here I am sat in Hong Kong International Airport waiting for my suitcase to show up before I can check in for my flight to Taipei.

I’m visiting Taiwan to see MSI, who is holding its inaugural two-day Master Overclocking Arena competition in the country’s capital city starting tomorrow.

MSI says that it has gathered the world’s best overclockers for the competition, and they will be using MSI’s P45D3 Platinum motherboard at the heart of a platform sponsored by Intel, Nvidia, OCZ Technology, Western Digital, Enermax and Genius.

Along with MSI’s motherboard, the contenders will draw from a selection of dual-core Core 2 Duo E8600 processors, OCZ PC3-16000 Platinum Edition memory modules and MSI N9800GTX Plus MOA Special Edition graphics cards.

The rest of the machine will not be drawn at random as the components are less critical to performance. They will comprise of a 22-inch Chimei 22GH monitor, a 300GB Western Digital VelociRaptor, an Enermax Modu 82+ 625W power supply, a Genius keyboard and an MSI mouse.

Once the hardware drawing has been completed, the teams will have three hours to assemble their systems and do any additional hardware modifications – the sky is the limit with regards to modification, but should the contenders permanently damage their hardware during modification, they will have one more chance with a spare. They will not be allowed to use this spare hardware if their components don’t overclock well enough though – I guess we might see some ‘deliberate’ damage done to boards if that is the case.

Following the set up phase, there will be two rounds to the competition – the first will be done using the SuperPI MOD 1.5 8M benchmark, which exclusively tests CPU and memory performance. The second round will use 3DMark 2001 SE Build 330, which will also be fairly CPU limited in this day and age – GPU clocks will make a bit of a difference, though. Each of these rounds will last 50 minutes, where the contenders are able to update their results at any time during the period, but their final result must be submitted before the end of the round.

Essentially, the team with the biggest improvement over stock performance across the two tests will win the event. It’s quite simple really, but I’m sure it’ll get a little more complex when liquid Nitrogen starts flowing.

I’m pretty tired having not got much sleep on the rather turbulent flight last night, so all I care about right now is finding somewhere to get a beer or three. But alas, I’ve got to wait until my bags show up before I’m allowed to check in and head to the departures lounge – expect more coverage on bit-tech throughout the weekend and into Monday.

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