MSI MOA Global Final 2010

Tales of Liquid Nitrogen

When you're dealing with liquid nitrogen insulation is crucial in order to prevent the water vapour in the air from crystalising, or worse, melting onto the surrounding hardware. There's different ways of insulating - from putty, to neoprene foam to painting on water repellent to, well, lubing it up with Vaseline or similar:



Most teams ran with the stock cooled GeForce GTX 480 for the Prime95 test as only the CPU was being stressed, although others took the time to prepare the card early to get more time in the 3.5hrs of 3DMark Vantage to tweak a better result.


Keeping an eye on temperatures and voltages to watch for cold bugs and spikes was a key feature - everyone had their own digital multimeters and thermometers to keep an eye on the motherboard and graphics card as they ramped up the clock speed.


Unfortunately team Poland's Core i7-980X failed to work, so they made use of one of the backups allowed during the event. And yes, that's a $9,000+ tray of Core i7s!


Most of the Core i7-980X CPUs clocked between 5.4-5.9GHz depending on the luck of the draw, good timing and quality of cooling/insulation. Most people complained about the Kingston memory using Powerchip ICs though, as they would have preferred Elpida Hyper. At least one team had a few dead modules by the end of the event after trying to force them with extra voltage.