Quote Originally Posted by jmke View Post
there was never an obligation for MSI VGA Card, that's not in the rules.
buying a good clocking CPU and capable memory is logic and doesn't matter what company is organizing the contest.

yes giving away free hardware is sure way to gain money... right? ;p

tell me how it would look if none of the winner(s) of the qualifiers used MSI products to obtain top results.
try to sell that idea to your marketing director.
Something doesn't completely add up.

Basicly, these competitions are PR only and have very little to do with actually ranking overclockers based on their overclocking skill. Actually, this is a very big point of discussion on which I could elaborate, but won't since it's not really on topic.

Now, since this event is to increase popularity of MSI-branded products, the marketing director (or whoever is in charge) is looking to maximize the PR of this event. So, instead of just one big final, they organise national qualifiers, regional finals and one worldwide final. This is pretty obvious since it increases the possibilities of marketing by a very big factor.

For these events, there are in fact two main audiences: the mainstream computer users and the enthousiast. The first group is already impressed by what these overclockers can get out of these systems on LN2, so it's fairly easy to attract their attention whereas the second group actually looks at the results achieved in the competition. The second group also is the group that has to be tricked into buying more products of the manufacturer organising the competition, so this group can be seen as the more important one.

Now, to attract the enthousiasts to either compete or follow this event, you actually need decent scores. It's fairly obvious that the group of enthousiasts will not be impressed when the winning score is much behind the world record in that benchmark. Now, how can you increase the interest of the enthousiasts:

1) You make the qualifiers open for everyone, so anyone can compete with any kind of hardware hoping to qualify for a live overclocking event
2) You make sure only the best overclockers/benchmarkers are on the live events to make sure you have high-end scores

By limiting the qualification rounds to those who actually have MSI-branded hardware, you limit the amount of people interested to submit a result. In addition, the amount of people willing to spend money on a new product is very limited: after all, you're only going to spend money if you think you have a chance on proceeding to the next round. It's fairly obvious that in the national/regional/worldwide finals only MSI products can be used.

My question now is how a solely MSI-based qualifying round is much better than a round in which everyone can compete with whatever hardware they want? You want the best overclockers to be present in the live finals, not the MSI-buyers.

These are just a few thoughts on the qualification process and the current concept of overclocking contests, though. I do realise that it's a little more difficult than this; in fact, I have a few ideas involving Hwbot that could increase the quality of these live events. I've running those ideas past some other people (Trouffman, for instance) and it seems that most of us are on the same page. Sadly enough, it's at the moment pretty difficult to actually make a change since there are so many different people involved in all this: it's virtually impossible to just sit down and talk things through.