Event Report: MSI Master Overclocking Arena 2011 Operation: Las Vegas
On January 6th, the first official day of the recent Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, MSI held their very first live Master Overclocking Arena (MOA) event hosted in the Americas. This competition, appropriately dubbed “Operating: Las Vegas”, was the first of the many upcoming MSI MOA 2011 live overclocking competitions that will be hosted all over the world, and that will culminate once again in a huge final event in the heart of the PC hardware industry - Taipei, Taiwan.
For this particular event, there were ten teams made up of 19 competitors (e-killer was missing due to visa issues) from all over North and South America. There were there to compete for bragging rights, some nice cash prizes, a bit of free hardware, and an all-expenses paid trip to the aforementioned MOA 2011 final event in Taipei.
<p style="text-align: justify;"><img src="http://images.hardwarecanucks.com/image/mac/articles/msimoa2011am/table1.jpg" style="float: left; margin: 0 0 4px 15px; clear: both;"> Now obviously this MSI Master Overclocking Arena 2011 Operation: Las Vegas competition was being held to determine who was the very best overclocking team in the Americas. However, MSI didn’t just randomly choose these teams at random though, the preparations and qualifications for this event started way back in October during an intense four week, five stage online competition hosted at hwbot.org.
The first stage was a challenge of who could get the highest 3DMark Vantage score using only Clarkdale’s integrated graphics processor (IGP) and an H55 or H57 motherboard. This stage was won by Chew* with 1064 3DMarks, courtesy of an Intel GMA HD IGP clocked at 1379Mhz, followed closely by Hondacity, who achieved 1043 3DMarks. The second stage consisted of achieving the best possible 3DMark01 result using the Clarkdale or Lynnfield LGA1156 platform and a discrete GPU. Brian y. took this round with 103,854 3DMarks, with Patch coming in second at 102,578. The goal of the third stage was to achieve highest 3DMark Vantage score using a single Radeon HD 5000 series graphics card. With a score of 30,100 3DMarks, and Radeon HD 5870 running a 1461Mhz GPU clock, rbuass took first place, followed closely by Steponz with 29,964. The fourth stage consisted achieving the best possible 3DMark Vantage score using a GeForce GTX 400 series graphics card. With his GeForce GTX 480 GPU at 1188Mhz, G H Z won this round with 34,685 3DMarks, while e-killer came in second at 34,348 with an even higher-clocked 1270Mhz GTX 480. The fifth and final stage combined the X58 LGA1366 platform and SuperPI 32M, two enthusiast favourites. Splave was the victor in this round with his efficient 6 minute 11 seconds run, with an i7-980X overclocked to 5935Mhz, while Gnidaol came in second with a 6 minutes 15 second run courtesy of an i7-980X at 6075Mhz.
So in the end, as you can see in the table above, everyone who came in first or second in a stage was invited to this MOA event in Las Vegas, and they were also allowed by bring a teammate with them. As mentioned above, e-killer did not attend this event due to visa issues, and there wasn't enough time to find a replacement, so Nestorky had to do everything by himself. Once again, we had no Canadian representative at this event, but Canadian overclocker mkultra did compete in the pre-selection process.
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So the day of the competition, January 6th, all the competitors met in the lobby of the Palms hotel, where everyone stayed, and subsequently made the short walk over to the Pole Position Raceway.
The Raceway was really an apt place to hold the competition, since while the overclockers were shaving seconds off of their SuperPI runs, MSI had organized for all the media and onlookers to try their hand at go-karting and maybe shave seconds off their lap times. Competitors that bowed out early also were able to do some go-karting, and there was a hefty case prize for the person who posted the fastest lap time.
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This is the banner that greeted everyone when they walked into the building, and as it says, let the campaign for domination begin…
![system ready for action]( http://images.hardwarecanucks.com/image/mac/articles/msimoa2011am/MSIMOAAM2011_137a.jpg" ]Kingpin himself was at their table[/zoom], Team PURE had their [ZOOM="http://images.hardwarecanucks.com/image/mac/articles/msimoa2011am/MSIMOAAM2011_190a.jpg){kind=link}
![3DMark 11 tests](http://images.hardwarecanucks.com/image/mac/articles/msimoa2011am/MSIMOAAM2011_287a.jpg"){kind=link}