Two of us landed earlier last week in Taipei to start preparing here in the city of hardware what is going to be the largest overclocking live competition final of 2013. MSI as a pioneer of extreme overclocking live events is doing it again this year and has invited overclockers from various countries to participate in what should be a promising two day competition.

MSI MOA 2013 – Competitors

Before discussing hardware and competition benchmarks, lets have a look at this years selection. MSI as for the previous MOA season organized the worldwide qualifiers in different regions through the HWBOT competition engine. Qualifier ran over the first half of 2013 and funneled the selection down to 16 competitors. 16? Yes. This year there will be less participants as the competition will be run with teams of one single overclockers instead of two as we were used to for the last seasons. But this isn’t really an issue here. 13 countries are still represented with about 80% of familiar faces (ie. previous year champions / MOA veterans or figures of the OC community).

• Korea: OC_Windforce
• Brazil: Rbuass and Gnidaol
• Australia: SniperOZ and JJJC
• Ukraine: Cyclone and T0lsty
• Poland: Xtreme_Addict
• USA: Mikecdm
• Canada: FTW
• South Africa: Vivi
• Russia: Smoke
• Italy: Giorgioprimo
• Japan: Gyrock
• Indonesia: Lucky_n00b
• Denmark: Zzolio

As you see, several familiar faces made it again this year into the selection. We are looking forward seeing again some old friends and meeting a few new ones.

MSI MOA 2013 – Competition hardware

Now let’s have a look at the hardware. As for previous MOA’s, MSI is looking into pushing their high-end gear with an event such as MOA, and this year this strategy repeats itself. So it’s without surprises that we see the MSI Haswell based platform making it to the competition.

• Motherboard: MSI Z87 MPOWER MAX (BIOS: E7815IMS.MOA)
• Graphics: MSI GeForce GTX 780 LIGHTNING (BIOS: NV296M0A.101 / Driver GeForce 326.80 Driver – BETA)
• CPU: Intel® CoreTM i7-4770K Processor
• Memory: Corsair Vengeance® Pro Series
• SSD: Plextor M5 Pro Xtreme
• PSU: Cooler Master Silent Pro M2 1500W
• Keyboard: Corsair Vengeance K70 Fully-Mechanical

Since this year the MOA competition is split in two parts (see competition rules section below): MOA legacy and freestyle, the hardware listed above stands only for the MOA legacy round (ie. the actual MOA 2013 finals). For the freestyle competition, more hardware freedom is given to the contestants, with the following restrictions:

• Motherboard:  Any MSI Z87 or X79 chipset motherboard
• Graphic card: MSI N600 series , N700 series or Titan graphics card
• CPU: Any Intel® Haswell or Ivy Bridge-E Processor
• Memory: Any memory
• SSD: Plextor M5 Pro Xtreme (Provided by MOA)
• PSU: Any Power Supply
• OS: Windows® 7 Ultimate SP1 64-bit & Windows® XP Professional SP3 (Provided by MOA)

More, freedom that should allow overclockers to really have some fun and possibly break a few records for cash.

MOA 2013 – Competition benchmarks and rules

Now lets have a look at the benchmarks for both the MOA finals and the freestyle competition. First MOA finals. This year, MSI selected the following benchmarks:

• Task 1: SuperPi32M (2h for 40%)
• Task 2: CineBench R11.5 (2h for 20%)
• Task 3: 3DMark Fire Strike (3h for 40%)

The amount of points allocated are indexed on the overclocking performance growth achieved based on the following baseline results:

• SuperPi32M = 7min 03.441 sec
• CineBench R11.5 = 8,93 points
• 3DMark Fire Strike = 9891 points

What do you thinK? The addition of CineBench as benchmark for this years MOA (and as a first in Live OC finals) makes it quite interesting and we will be eager to see how this turns out. Hit this link for the complete MOA 2013 WW Finals (classic competition) rules.   On the second day, overclockers facing the freestyle challenge will be free to pick benchmarks out of the following pool:

• Haswell CPU Frequency
• SuperPI 32M
• XTU
• Cinebench R11.5
• 3DMark Vantage Performance
• N780 3DMark11 Performance
• N780 3DMark Fire Strike Extreme
• Heaven Benchmark 4.0 DX11
• Memory Clock

Click the following link for the detailed rules of the freestyle competition. For each record broken in the different benchmark categories, the highest bider of the day will be awarded with cash prize from MSI + an extra cash prize of the record was broken using Corsair memory. Sweet, right? Which leads us to …  to the prizes!

MSI MOA 2013 – Competition prizes

The MOA classic contest is following a similar prize allocation as for the previous seasons. Each contestant goes home with the hardware of the competition + prize money for the top 3. The top 3 contestants of the MOA finals will receive as for the previous seasons respectively: 3,000USD for the first place, 2,000USD for the second and 1,000USD. Nice – especially since there are only single overclocker teams this year, this means 50% more gain for this year’s winners! Regarding the freestyle battle, MSI will be awarding for each top record holder of each benchmark a 1,000USD prize. On top of that, if the record was made with Corsair memory, the prize doubles with an addition of 1,000USD through Corsair. This raises the total cash pool allocated to this event to 26,000USD: which is to date, the highest valued live competition of 2013.

MOA 2013 – Live Broadcast

As for the previous seasons and for recent live OC competitions, we will be the official live broadcast provider. The live-stream will be following the following schedules:

Day 1: MOA Classic – Friday 18th of October

and for the second day (freestyle competition) – Saturday 19th of October

Join us live here: http://www.overclocking-tv.com/live and follow us on Facebook or Twitter for the latest details and updates from the competition.

See you at the MOA!

So that’s it! All important details for this year’s MOA are here. If any questions, make sure to drop us a comment below or ask us on Facebook or Twitter. Keep pushing it!