Introduction, PCPer Hardware Workshop
Hardware workshop features system build, case mod contests
The third and final day drew thousands of gamers and curious people to Quakecon’s exhibition hall and Bring Your Own Computer (BYOC) area. Some gamers were pretty weary from all-night gaming sessions, while others continued to press on by playing Tribes: Ascend, Rage, Team Fortress 2, and Left 4 Dead 2. Others took time out from gaming to make the rounds to various panel discussions with community managers from Respawn, id Software, Bethesda Softworks, and Insomniac and learn more about first-person gaming from id Software’s Tim Willits and other developers in the gaming industry.
Each day started with Ventrilo’s Rage Quick Drive drawing that gave gamers an opportunity to win $1,000 and tickets for a chance to win a brand-new 2011 Molten Orange Ford F-150 Raptor SVT, complete with the Hennessey VelociRaptor 600 SC upgrade package. Today’s quick drive drawing started with Marty Stratton from id Software crowd surfing at the main stage in the exhibition hall.
Continue reading the final day’s coverage from Quakecon 2011!!
The main event of the day was our PC Perspective Hardware Workshop that was sponsored by Corsair, NVIDIA, and OCZ Technology. The first item on the workshop agenda was to let the audience pick the overall winners of our annual case mod contest. There were a lot of great entries, but this custom submerged PC was one of the finalists in the custom built PC category.
Three-time case mod champion Derrick Jackson brought a new mod to the hardware workshop this year dubbed "Blue Men of Genius". The artistic design features little silver men trying to cool down the hardware components that are glowing with red LED lights. The audience loved Jackson’s mod so much that they awarded him first place in the custom built category.
One of our finalists for the case mod category brought an old-school acrylic micro ATX system to the table that was lit up with UV lights. He used multi-colored, UV-coated rocks and a couple bowling trophies on his case mod to get a resounding applause from the workshop audience.
The winner of the case mod category sported a custom watercooling system with a triple radiator setup. The unique aspect of this Corsair case mod was creating a pink coolant for the watercooling liquid that ran throughout the entire WC system. The case was very cleanly organized and all the power supply and data cables were sleeved and tucked away behind the motherboard. They also swapped out all the LEDs in the case for pink ones to match the entire theme they were looking for.
Ryan demo’ed Civilization V on a multi-monitor system that incorporated a Galaxy GeForce MDT x5 graphics card that supported five monitors during the hardware workshop. The GeForce GTX 560 Ti MDT x5 video card comes with six display output connectors – four mini-HDMI, one DVI and one Display port connector.
Tom Petersen, NVIDIA’s director of technical marketing, gave the hardware workshop crowd a quick overview of how NVIDIA’s Tegra 2 chip is incorporated in many Android-based mobile and tablet devices. Petersen also discussed PNY’s new self-contained watercooling system for select XLR8 graphics cards. The watercooling unit can also be purchased to support CPU cooling in tandem with GPU cooling. Lastly, Petersen mentioned NVIDIA’s GeForce Starcraft II Pro/Am tourney that is currently underway via Steam.
Petersen had a bit of fun with Ryan’s head in one of his graphics demos that got a huge laugh from the hardware workshop crowd and many of the staff members at PCPer.
Corsair was the hardware workshop’s largest sponsor this year and provided us three gaming series power supplies, three 8GB DDR3 memory kits, a Graphite 600T case, two Obsidian 650D cases, an H100 liquid cooling unit, two H60 CPU coolers, two Force Series 3 solid state drives, 50 HS1 and HS1A gaming headsets, 5 32GB Flash Voyager USB drives, and 10 SP2100 / SP2500 speaker sets! Thanks so much to Corsair for supporting our event this year.
How does that GTX MDT x5 card
How does that GTX MDT x5 card work, is it comparable to Eyefinity’s one large display canvas?
More or less but it is a
More or less but it is a hardware solution rather than a software one.
We’ll have one in for review next week I think.
The girls were looking good,
The girls were looking good, the case mods weren’t bad either. Maybe I’ll end up at the event one of these days.
Good work.
Where are pictures of
Where are pictures of Alienware girls?
I was disappointed that the
I was disappointed that the Rage RC car mod didn’t make it to the finals. It was pretty sweet.
Yup, we thought it was pretty
Yup, we thought it was pretty good. I think it would have been 3rd or 4th on the list of custom built designs.
This year the prizes for the
This year the prizes for the Mod contest winners were a joke…Come on Alienware and NVIDIA WTF!
Thanks Steve, Ryan & Corsair,
Thanks Steve, Ryan & Corsair, Intel, nVidia and the other PCper Hardware Workshop Sponsors. I was one of the lucky event volunteers to win a i5-2500K LGA1155 processor.
So, buy z-68 board now? Or is there something I should hold off on for coming within the next month or so?
I look forward to next year’s event. I hope to see the addition of more tech centric discussion show, with a second show for the hardware giveaways.
I would like to see a panel of speakers discussing future hardware outlooks. Ryan, Patrick Norton, Kyle Bennett, Anand Lal Shimpi, Allyn Malventano on one side; and a few guests from Intel, AMD/ATI, nVidia, ARM and such, on the other.
See you next year!
-Bugs
Thanks to PC Perspective (and
Thanks to PC Perspective (and Tom from nVidia) for holding a kick-ass workshop at Quakecon this year. I didn’t win anything in the raffles, but I walked away with a lifetime of great memories, plus a battle scar courtesy of a HS1 box hitting me upside the head!