Last year’s champions returns to win MSI MOA for the second time

Elmor and ME4ME take home the victory for Sweden

THIS WEEKEND MSI’S MOA or Master Overclocking Arena finals took place in Taipei, Taiwan with 20 teams from around the world competing against each other in what wasn’t exactly what we’d call an intense competition, but it turned out to be a fight to the end. MSI gambled and made a last minute change to the gear used by adding its N480GTX Lighting graphics card into the mix which threw a spanner in the wheel for most of the teams.

The graphics card – which launched at the event, more to come on that in a separate article, – is MSI’s in-house designed GTX 480 card which is vastly different compared to Nvidia’s reference cards. It also proved to be anything but a simple beast to tame as three teams didn’t even mange to get any results out of their cards. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves slightly as the first benchmark didn’t rely on the graphics card.

All the teams were equipped with MSI’s Big Bang XPower motherboard and a Core i7 980X CPU as well as 6GB of DDR3 memory rated at 2250MHz from Kingston. The first task of the day was Super PI 32M and here things were close, very close. Sadly Singapore had problems with their hardware and had to call it quits at the first stage, but they weren’t the only ones with problems as Team Laddergoat from Sweden managed to set one of their two boards on fire.

At this stage team XtremeLabs.org from the Ukraine took a very slim lead ahead of team Dark Horses from Italy and team Xfastest from Taiwan and Hong Kong. The three hour 3DMark Vantage session ended up causing a lot of headache for the teams with both Finland, Poland and the Ukraine in the lead at one stage. In the end it was The Expendables from Sweden consisting of last year’s winner Elmor and his team mate ME4ME that managed to figure out how to master MSI’s N480GTX Lightning and took the lead by over 2000 points in 3DMark Vantage with a final score of 37424 points.

The Ukrainian team came second, followed by Poland. The winners received a cheque for $3000, with the runners up receiving $2000 and $1000 respectively. The top five teams, which included South Korea and Italy, also won all the kit supplied for the event. For video coverage from the event we suggest you head over to Overclocking TV which was live streaming the event and who has videos as well as interviews from the event over the next few days. You can find the final results from the even here with the best US team coming in at ninth place.

Oh yes, there was one more thing, the Princess Leia competition we wrote about a little while back. Well, we’ll let you make up your own mind as to which one of these two looks the most like the real deal. We never figured out which of the two girls ended up as the winner in the end, but one lucky competitor at the event ended up winning a dinner date with one of the girls.S|A

 

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