Intel and Fatal1ty
Intel
Intel wasn’t going to let E3, the biggest gaming expo in the world, pass it by without showing off their upcoming Conroe and Merom processors based on the Core 2 architecture that we previewed during IDF this year.
This notebook was running a simple physics demonstration that Intel put together to help visualize the difference that coding for dual cores can bring to gaming. Appropriately titled “Destroy the Castle Demo” there shouldn’t be any questions about what it does; you shooting a castle built of blocks and it falls apart according to physics laws. Intel was able to swicth between single and multi-threaded versions of the code and showed us a significant performance increase when both cores are utilized.
Just as we had seen at GDC and IDF this year, Intel was demonstrating the power of their upcoming Merom processor for mobile gaming by competing against the current Core Duo processor in a Quake 4 timedemo.
Also on display was an upcoming Dell system featuring support for the Conroe processor and Quad SLI. I posted some more details on this upcoming XPS gaming system in an earlier article, and you should check it out for a preview of what could be the ultimate gaming system.
Finally, on the show floor, Dell and Intel teamed up to get a boat-load of systems all playing Quake 4. Both notebooks and desktop machines were used to showcase the versatility that Intel’s upcoming chips will offer.
Fatal1ty
Fatal1ty’s name is one that has been seen at nearly every show and expo that I have been to in the last two years. His Fatal1ty shootouts are wildly popular and tend to draw the largest audiences of any booth. This year was no exception as he sat down to play against anyone who would dare in a one-on-one Quake 4 death match.
New this year, and announced just prior ot E3, XFX has beomce the graphics card partner of choice for Fatal1ty. I was told by on-site staff that we will soon see Fatal1ty branded products from XFX, replacing the current “XXX” line up and ridding us of the horrible porn jokes once and for all.
Zalman is the cooling partner of choice from the Fatal1ty camp and he has some custom-branded CPU and GPU coolers to show for it.
If you thought Abit was dead, think again. They are alive and kicking (as I can tell you from the boards we have in lab) and are working with Fatal1ty on new motherboards as well for both Intel and AMD platforms. We have reviewed three different motherboards with his name on them, and most have been very good units.
Complete Fatal1ty systems were on hand that combined all of the Fatal1ty branded components into one very fast, very expensive gaming system.
Oh, and on a final and humerous note, Fatal1ty did play against poker-legend Chris “Jesus” Ferguson. He of course lost horribly like the rest, but it was ironic to see a “Fatal1ty vs. Jesus” label in Quake 4!
