Redmax presents the story of his MSI MOA Americas 2012 qualification adventure. Nice and interesting read!

MOA or the Master Overclockers Arena is a MSI sponsored overclocking event designed to bring attention to MSI hardware and give overclockers a chance to gain notoriety in the field. Now I have participated in a few online overclocking competitions before with no real success other than saying I participated. Personally, I look back on those events and feel that my failures were split between hardware selections (the binning process) and skill. Knowing this I set out with a different approach to the MOA qualifier.

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Lessons Learned

I was at a disadvantage going into the competition due to my decision to keep with X79 for all of the benchmarks. Had I used a Z77 or Z68 motherboard my SuperPi 32M score would have been better and I might have had a better chance at getting a higher score in 3DMark 03. All things considered I did extremely well in 3DMark 11 and was within 100 marks of 4th place.

As we know overclocking isn't guaranteed nor are you guaranteed a good GPU even if you pay extra for a Lightning edition video card. What get is a video card designed for overclocking matched with whatever chip MSI decides to slap on there. Extreme overclockers like them because there are no modifications to make and hardware enthusiasts like them because they are custom PCBs and come with a factory overclock.

Assuming I did spend the extra bucks to run both LGA 2011 and LGA 1155 I would have been in the contest for the cost of new hardware, namely a new Z68 or Z77 motherboard. My current 2600K will do 5.7Ghz but I really needed 5.9Ghz to be competitive. (e.g. in the top 1% of golden Sandy Bridge processors). People get golden processors all the time and the majority of them don't even know it. The way I see it, I got lucky once and the chance of getting something worse was greater than getting something better.

All things considered I felt my MOA bid was a strong one, I learned some stuff and was able to grab the attention of some folks who, had otherwise, never paid much attention to me before. Neither of which are a bad thing.

Seems like a little internal communication failure inside Nvidia. The GTX670 seems to clock quite well; a new GTX 275 is born?

In our launch review of the GeForce GTX 670 2GB graphics card this week, we had initially mentioned that these $399 graphics cards would support SLI, 3-Way SLI and even 4-Way SLI configurations thanks to the pair of SLI connections on the PCB. We received an update from NVIDIA later on that day that in fact it would NOT support 4-Way SLI.

The message from NVIDIA was pretty clear cut: "As I’m sure you can imagine, we have to QA every feature that we claim support for and this takes a tremendous amount of time/resources. For the GTX 680 and GTX 690, we do support Quad SLI and take the time to QA it, as it makes sense for the extreme OC’ers and ultra-enthusiasts who are shooting to break world records."

My reply: "But with the similarities between the GTX 680 and the GTX 670, is there really any QA addition required to enable quad for 670? Seems like a cop-out to me man..."

I saw it mostly as a reason to differentiate the GTX 670 and the GTX 680 with a feature since the performance between the cards was very similar; maybe too similar for NVIDIA's tastes with the $100 price difference.

Well this afternoon we received some good news from our contact at NVIDIA: "Change in plans.....we will be offering 4-Way SLI support for GTX 670 in a future driver."

So while the 301.34 driver will not support 4-Way configurations with the GTX 670, 4-Way SLI will in fact be enabled after all in a future version. We'll be sure to keep you in the loop when that happens and the super-extreme enthusiasts can rejoice.

This does go to show that the fundamental differences between AMD's license-free and seemingly more "open" CrossFire technology and NVIDIA's for-fee SLI technology. With enough feedback and prodding in the right direction, NVIDIA can and does do the right thing, just look at the success we had convincing them to support SLI on AMD CPU platforms last year.

Feet to the fire everyone!

Interesting follow-up on the Ivy Bridge TIM debate. What do you guys think about this?

It's proven: the thermal interface material (TIM) used by Intel, inside the integrated heatspreader (IHS) of its Core "Ivy Bridge" processors are behind its higher than expected load temperatures. This assertion was first made in late-April by an Overclockers.com report, and was recently put to test by Japanese tech portal PC Watch, in which an investigator carefully removed the IHS of a Core i7-3770K processor, removed the included TIM and binding grease, and replaced them with a pair of aftermarket performance TIMs, such as OCZ Freeze and Coolaboratory Liquid Pro.

PC Watch findings show that swapping the TIM, if done right, can shave stock clock (3.5 GHz, Auto voltage) temperatures by as much as 18% (lowest temperatures by the Coolaboratory TIM), and 4.00 GHz @ 1.2V temperatures by as much as 23% (again, lowest temperatures on the Coolaboratory TIM). The change in TIM was also change the overclockability of the chip, which was then able to sustain higher core voltages to facilitate higher core clock speeds. The report concluded that Intel's decision to use thermal paste inside the IHS of its Ivy Bridge chips, instead of fluxless solder, poses a very real impact on temperatures and overclockability.

Seems like a cool opportunity to meet other overclockers in the Kuala Lumpur region! Have fun all!

All of us know the MOA competition from MSI (read our news about the American qualification), but today here is something different. This event that is going to take place in Malaysia is something new for MSI.

Indeed, MSI will be holding this weekend an event to attract new overclockers. So far we only heard about other vendors pushing that kind of events and it is a great news to see MSI doing the move in south-east asia.

Malaysia MSI OCer Gathering

Known under the name of MOA 2012, MSI malaysia decided to hold a gathering to educate people about Overclocking. This event focuses on Mild Overclockers and New Overclockers. As for similar events, this events intends to increase overclocking awareness, teach enthusiasts about it and ignite overclocking knowledge sharing.

This event will be divided into 3 sections. An overclocking talk, an Extreme overclocking demo and also a competition.

By the way about the overclocking talks, two overclockers will be joining MSI for doing the talks:

• Peter Cave - bob(nz)
• Alex Tan - sup3rfly

bob(nz) being from NewZealand and sup3rfly being from Malaysia.

MSI Malaysia – Overclocking Competition

To participate to the competition, you have to send an Email to aqmalzaki [ at ] msi .com with the following details:

• Real Name
• Contact number

Hurry-up, only the first 25 will be able to participate at the Overclocking Competition.

Here's the latest Ninjalane podcast episode. The third part (starts around 23th minute) of the episode is about MOA and how it feels to be a participant. This is an interesting one!

Hosts: Dennis Garcia and Darren Mccain

Time: 37:03

Listen NOW

Prepping for MOA (MSI Master Overclocking Arena)

For the past few years MSI has sponsored an overclocking competition called MOA, or the Master Overclocking Arena. The competition is designed to find the best overclockers in the world place them in head to head competition with real cash prizes going to the winners. The process starts with a series of regional qualifiers with the top point leaders getting a free trip to Taipei Taiwan to compete in the finals.

The American qualifier starts April 13th 2012 and runs until May 11th 2012 with the top three point leaders getting a shot at the finals. Dennis is participating this year and talks about what he did to prepare for the competition.