Day 3 and Final Thoughts
This content was originally featured on Amdmb.com and has been converted to PC Perspective’s website. Some color changes and flaws may appear.
The third and final day for me at Quakecon 2002 didn’t have as much “news” as the previous two, but was a little more fun overall. This day began with our good friend Kyle Bennett’s HardOCP Workshop. As you all know, Kyle is the owner of HardOCP and has become somewhat of a community leader in the world of hardware websites. Below are some pictures of the workshop and the sponsor’s prizes that were given out.
This was the “rotten apple” that Kyle has been touting about for some time on his site. The unique case modifications that went into were done by Brian from HardOCP as well. The system was of course NOT an Apple system but instead had a KT266A micro-ATX motherboard in it (that had to be physically modified to fit) as well as a yet unannounced AMD processor and a Radeon 9700 Pro video card.
Here we have a shot of the Mac case open. Notice the lights you see when its open? That unique feature works just like your refrigerator door. Very nice!
ATI attempted to show off their as of yet unannounced M9 mobile grahpics technology, but for some reason the projectors weren’t working with the laptop. The NDA on this product isn’t nearly up yet, and the ATI case you see was meant to keep us from discovering who the manufacturer was of the actual laptop. What I was able to get from ATI was this M9 chipset was going to be somewhere between the Radeon 9000 and 9700 in terms of performance. Easy LAN gaming is right around the corner!
Here we see the eager crowd wanting the prizes!
Here Kyle gives out a few AMD chips that were donated for the workshop.
There were five Visiontek GeForce 4 Ti 4600 cards given out to the audience.
But the big draw was in the five Radeon 9700 Pro cards that were given out. The cards were not actually in the box, though, but a voucher was in place so that the winners would get once shipped from ATI on Monday.
Final Thoughts
This was my first year at Quakecon, but I am already sure that I will be back again next year. The show was a lot of fun, especially meeting some the Amdmb.com readers that came up to me when I was wearing the site’s Tshirts. Thanks guys!
Of course, no show would be complete without the awards presentation in which the Wolfenstein winning team was given trophies in the form of large ammunition shells and $25,000.
As the night went on, id Software had set up a very good local band to play for the crowd while the bar stayed open well into the night.
I hope you all enjoyed my coverage of the 2002 Quakecon gaming convention. Maybe next year, I will see you there!
Update! Hey, it was late when this was written! 🙂 Make sure you read this!!
I just have a few interesting points to make before I hit the hay. First, several hardware manufacturers here have 100% verified my story on the upcoming 333 MHz front-side bus. VIA and Shuttle both told me that this was going to happen. And, though it won’t be on the 2600+ processor, the first one to have the bus increase is going to be the 2800+ Athlon XP, which will actually be coming up sooner than most people are going to realize. While others might have tried to down play my initial post about these things a few weeks ago, we can now see that my tips were right on the money.
Finally, with all the KT400 motherboards that I was showing you all pictures of, I got lots of email as to when I would be publishing a review of one. Well, I am still not quite sure of that, but now that I was able to get a VIA KT400 reference board from VIA while at Quakecon, it may be pretty soon. I haven’t yet decided if I going to publish numbers and benchmarks that I get from this board, as it was not designed or tweaked to be a final production board in any way. Basically, this board was meant to be sent out to OEMs and the like to show the board in a working state to and test for any kind of incompatabilities. It was not meant to showcase any kind of performance gains, and VIA warned that it may in fact be slower than the KT333 boards because of it. If this is inded the case, I will just be waiting for a retail board to reach me as they would have spent the time necessary on the chipset to get ready for public consumption. We can only wait and see.
