MSI's Master Overclocking Arena 2008

Cooling down

After the insulation process was complete, it was then time for the teams to start cooling down and finding the limits of their hardware. Team Turkey interestingly didn’t use a traditional mounting for their cooling pot and instead used a G-clamp that applied pressure down directly above the CPU.

In many ways, this is a better solution, because it ensures that the contact between cooling pot and CPU core is as good as it can be – there’s very little chance of a poor contact or even pressure over the CPU core.

Interestingly, team Coolaler Taiwan pulled the dry ice out to cool their GPU down in a way I’d not seen before this event. The team was watercooling their GPU, but instead of having what we’d call a traditional reservoir, they were using a bucket with blocks of dry ice added for good measure.

This meant the GPU was fully loaded at around 25 degrees, which was low enough for them to overclock the GPU core to approximately 950MHz.


Team Thailand was fiddling around in the BIOS with voltages, trying to find the optimal set up for their hardware. They were running CPU voltages in excess of 1.9V here, which is pretty steep for a 45nm processor – the cooling should more than make up for that though. The tissues were out in full force at this time.


Blue screens were common at this time, as the overclockers pushed their systems to the absolute limit. Cold bugs were also quite regular too – a couple of teams actually managed to kill hardware during this part of the competition, long before the actual benchmarking started, because of cold bugs where the board just refused to boot after being a little over-zealous with the liquid nitrogen.


While the teams were warming up, Janet Hsieh, a popular TV hostess in Taiwan talked about the basics of overclocking with local overclocking legend Coolaler. They did a series of interviews for Taiwanese TV networks (in Chinese of course), where they talked about liquid nitrogen and why it’s used in extreme overclocking – Hsieh seemed startled when she froze a flower in Coolaler’s pot of fizzing liquid nitrogen.