HardOCP Hardware Workshop and Conclusion
HardOCP Hardware Workshop
For the past three years, this has been my favorite part of the Quakecon show. Kyle Bennett of HardOCP takes the time to gather up a couple truck loads of prizes, not to mention some of the best minds in the industry, to come speak with the hardware enthusiast crowd.
People entering the room were given this image to peruse their potential winnings. There were lots of graphics cards, motherboard, processors, a SFF system, cooling components and even mice and keyboards.
During the workshop, some prizes were randomly thrown into the crowd, causing the mass hysteria that you see here.
Yes, that is right, Kyle is seen holding a first-gen Phantom console; and that smirk tells it all. In case you don’t already know, Kyle is involved in a lawsuit with Infinium Labs, the maker of the yet-unreleased Phantom. Of course, the fun didn’t stop there: watch this short video for the rest of the ‘smashing’ conclusion!
Click for 1.5 MB WMV Movie File (Right Click and Choose “Save As…”)
After all of that excitement, we got to hear from the speakers.
This is John Crank from AMD, who was one of the lead designers on the K7 core. He spoke about the K8 core and AMD’s move to dual-core chips very soon, though not a whole lot of details were released about it yet. It was mentioned that the 754-pin socket would soon migrate to Sempron based solutions only and the 939 socket was going to be used even in the low-cost Athlon 64 market very soon.
Next up we heard from Scott Thirlwell of Abit, announcing the upcoming release of the Fatal1ty brand of motherboards. More on that can be found by checking out our news post with pictures of the board here.
VIA’s John Gatt was on hand to discuss their chipset plans that included having multiple north bridge chips ready for the PCI Express launch on their AMD and Intel platforms. You will find at least a few north bridges for each line that include different features like amount of PCI Express lanes (mostly for the NVIDIA SLI features that are gaining momentum).
Micah from the NVIDIA platforms division discussed their chipset plans as well, including similar types of information about various versions of their upcoming chipsets that will have various widths of PCI Express support.
Kyle gave the crowd his comments and thoughts on the processor, motherboard, chipset and graphics card industries as well. I’d again like to thank Kyle for hosting this event as it always turns out to be a lot of fun and very informative for those in attendance.
Conclusion
The 2004 Quakecon was a huge success for everyone involved, and was made all the sweeter with the fact that Doom 3 was finally available and we weren’t just limited to demos and movies.
I’d really like to thank the Quakecon volunteers, id Software, NVIDIA, VIA, Linksys and all the other sponsors and vendors for helping to make Quakecon 2004 possible. It’s your support that has helped the community grow into what it is now and I am eager to see where gaming and computers will be in nine more years.
