Romania wins MSI Master Overclocking Arena 2011

Professional level overclocking has become a very competitive sport, mind you, it's only really competitive within the community itself but that hasn't stopped the motherboard manufacturers to host competitions for the world's best overclockers. Friday saw the fourth annual MSI Master Overclocking Arena final in Taipei with competitors from all over the planet compete to become the world champion, or at least the world champion using MSI motherboards to overclock with.

Professional level overclocking has become a very competitive sport, mind you, it's only really competitive within the community itself but that hasn't stopped the motherboard manufacturers to host competitions for the world's best overclockers. Friday saw the fourth annual MSI Master Overclocking Arena final in Taipei with competitors from all over the planet compete to become the world champion, or at least the world champion using MSI motherboards to overclock with.

Sixteen teams from all over the world were competing against each other, although this year Singapore didn't have anyone representing them at the finals. It's always a lot of speculation as to who will win these competitions, but it's difficult to predict as a lot of it comes down to the kit. It's not rare that motherboards or graphics cards fail due to the extreme temperatures and as far as the 3D benchmarks are concerned there tend to be issues with the memory not clocking equally high on the various graphics cards. However, the one thing that can easily prevent a team from winning is the CPU and although the CPU's have been pre-tested, they usually don't all overclock to the same speed. The components are given based on a lottery where each team gets to pick a number with corresponds to either a CPU or an entire setup.

The benchmarks this time around was Super PI 32M, 3DMark 11 and good old 3DMark 2001SE. Even before the competition had started, last year's winner of Gigabyte's GO OC competition, matose from Romania was tipped off to be the winner with his team mate Monstru. That said, both the Greek team with Stelars and Aristidis (which came second) and the Swedish team consisting of Elmor and ME4ME (which came third) were tipped to be among the top teams and although this is sort of spoiling things, it's how things played out at the end of the day, much of thanks to the luck of the draw. That said, there were other teams that took the lead from time to time and it was only in the last minutes of the competition that it was clear that Romania would win MOA.

Beyond the competition itself, MSI was also hosting various little shows to go with the event as well as a PC building competition for students together with the local PC DIY magazine.  The sponsors – Intel, Kingston, Thermaltake and Western Digital – were also attending the event and were showing off some of their products and giving away from freebies. We shot a short video at the event that gives you an idea of what was going on and you can check out some additional pictures from the event on the next page.

For more detailed information, check out the MSI MOA website