MSI MOA Global Final 2010

3DMark Vantage

After the 2.5 of 32M Prime95 testing, MSI moved the competition onto the next phase; 3.5 hours for 3DMark Vantage performance testing. Here it's brand new GeForce GTX 480 Lightning graphics card was used, which, for the most part ran smoothly. A few teams had gotten to play with engineering samples before others though, allowing them to work out volt mods prior to the event. Luckily because the socket area is kept the same everyone's cooling pots appeared to fit, although quite a few teams eschewed cooling the DirectFETs power hardware MSI has used on the card, concentrating on the GPU Core instead.


One team took to timing how long it took for the memory usage to plateau before running the benchmarks, in order to not have the OS interfere, while other teams resorted to busting out mascots for luck.


Put the kettle on!

And the Winners were...

After a strong initial Prime95 performance from Ukraine, Italy and Taiwan-Hong Kong teams, team Sweden - The Expandables - managed to squeeze 1.4GHz core frequency out of their MSI N480GTX Lightning to grab a 3DMark Vantage score of 37424, setting them well apart from the rest, even with 'just' a 5.3GHz CPU. Comparatively the current HWBot global leader for a single GeForce GTX 480 manages a score of 38k in the same test, but with a 6.1GHz chip.


On a side note, things got more than a bit surreal during the event. There was Darth Vader and some dancing storm troopers that took to the stage, as well as Princess Leias posing for photos, before proceedings went on to poke a lightsabre into the, uh, 'ball thing'. Honestly, I had no idea what was happening and it felt like the place was on acid for about 30 minutes. We were afraid to ask whether George Lucas got his cut as well.. *shh shh!*