The MSI HQ Tour: Design 101

No visit to a HQ would be complete with a look at the dedicated overclock testing facilities. The concept of an OC Lab has been brewing, especially in the motherboard industry, for a number of years and especially in companies that hold world-wide overclocking competitions. While our previous visits to these labs are usually separate rooms connected to a generic office structure, MSI’s is part of an open-cubicle office, just with higher walls and more ventilation for liquid nitrogen vapor.

At the time we visited, MSI had invited several high-profile overclockers who were present during Computex to come and test equipment. As shown above, Lucky_n00b (Alva Jonathan from Jagat Review) was testing a tray of CPUs with Cinebench. The testing being done at the time included Broadwell processors, MSI’s new X99A Gaming Godlike motherboard and other systems which we were not allowed to photograph. The OC Lab is still in construction, as the elements on the wall shown in the picture are meant to be connected and provide several stations of water cooling via a full-room water cooling set of apparatus, provided in conjunction with Bitspower.

The purpose of the OC Lab, aside from helping generate world record overclocking results for MSI, is two-fold – pushing hardware to the limit, and aiding the overclocking community. This means high frequency RAM kit QVL testing, among other things, as shown above. MSI has several high profile overclockers either employed full-time or acting in a consultancy capacity, and given my own background as an extreme overclocker and former world #2, we had some interesting discussions about the state of extreme overclocking.

The HQ Tour was ultimately short and sweet – there’s little to see beyond rows of cubicles of people designing and testing hardware or marketing/sales doing their normal things. As I mentioned at the top of the piece, spending time with MSI was also in part to discuss with the engineers and BIOS/software designers about the current state of the industry and what end-users might be looking forward to. As part of those discussions, we were able to do a combined interview with three of MSI’s VIPs – Charles Chiang (Executive VP & GM of DPS Business Unit), Ted Hung (VP of Motherboard Sales), and Andy Tung (President of MSI Pan America). This is still being transcribed and will be posted in a separate piece in the near future.