MSI Makes Huge Entry into Overclocking

Pushing systems to the limit with liquid nitrogen.

MSI kicked off its Master Overclocking Arena (MOA) event today at Pole Position Raceway in Las Vegas. The event, the first major event of its kind by MSI, brings a certain air to MSI motherboards that was not previously there. Make no mistake though, whatever pre-conceived notions that you had about MSI motherboards can be chucked out the windows.

To demonstrate how serious it is about the stability and overclocking potential of its new line of motherboards, a large group of professional overclockers were invited to overclock and benchmark MSI's Big Bang-Xpower motherboard. Paired with an Intel Core i7-980X Extreme Edition, the players were also given a selection of hardware:

Motherboard: MSI Big Bang-XPower (X58 chipset)
BIOS: A7666IMS.148
Graphics Card: MSI N580GTX
Driver: 263.09 WHQL
Memory: Patriot Sector 7 PC3-1600 (3*2G)
HDD: Western Digital VelociRaptor WD3000HLFS
PSU: Antec CP-1000

Tools being used:

CPU-Z V1.56
GPU-Z V0.48
CPU Tweaker V1.5
Maxon Cinebench V11.529
wPrime V1.55/V2.04
MSI Afterburner Setup 210MOA (V2.1.0 MOA)

Overclockers were asked to log scores primarily using SuperPI 32M and 3DMark 2011. Keep in mind that the Big Bang-Xpower isn't part of MSI's newest line-up, which is called Big Bang Marshal -- a Sandy Bridge P67 based lineup coming out soon.

You can watch a live stream of the event on justin.tv here.

Check out some photos of the show!