News

August 15, 2003

The 8th Annual Quakecon is shaping up to be the best yet!

I cannot believe that it has already been a year since Quakecon 2002; this past year has gone by so fast! There are many different things about Quakecon this year, that, I think, makes it a better place overall. For starters the actual convention is held in a different place, it is held at The Adam’s Mark Hotel in Downtown Dallas, Texas. The past couple of years it was held in Mesquite, Texas. The Adam’s Mark Hotel is humongous and has tons of different rooms for everything. This means that the entire convention was way more organized than in previous years, and this made it more professional looking.

There are a lot of company’s sponsors up in the exhibition room, showing off their new products to the gaming world. The first thing that everybody sees when they first get into the room is the long line to the NVIDIA area. The reason is they are giving away free optical mouse, and a chance to win one of their new Graphic Cards. One of the biggest contests they have is the PC building contest; people are competing to see who can build a computer from scratch and boot to windows without any error the fastest. The winner of this spiffy contest gets a PC! NVIDIA is also putting up the $125,000 prize money.

The next place visited was the AMD booth. In this area people got to see the new AMD 64 bit chips in action, and see how well it performs. AMD also supplied over 125 computers and twenty servers for the tournament and BYOC (Bring your own computer) area. Not to be outdone by NVIDIA, AMD was holding a contest to see who would do the craziest thing for a prize. All players had to do is think of a crazy concept and perform it in front of a ton of people, and hope that no one will top you.

Linksys had one of the best products I have seen in a long time in their area. The name of this new product is the: Wireless-B Media Adapter. Here is what it does: “The Linksys Wireless-B Media Adapter lets you bring the digital music and pictures stored on your computer to your Home Entertainment Center, without running cables through the house” I have a pretty nice home theater system, and a ton of mp3s and other things on my PC, and I really don’t want to burn them on a CD, to me that takes too much effort and really isn’t worth my time. This little device can change all of that for many people who feel the same way as I do. The only downside to this I didn’t get a chance to see it in action, but if it works the way they say it does, it will be a must buy for anyone!

VIA Technologies was my next stop at this convention, and it was worth the time that was spent there. While looking around I met with John Gatt, a member of the We Media Liaison and VIA Arena Team. He showed me around the booth and really explained what they have done to each of the machines from Intel Pentium 4’s to the new AMD 64. The benchmarking on the AMD 64 CPU with everything you can think of had Quake III going over 350 (I believe it was more but I forgot the exact number) frames per second. The technology they have put into their chipsets is amazing and something that is a marvel to see. One of the last things he showed me was a computer the size of a CD-ROM drive that can be used in a car. The computer was powerful enough to run a game of Quake I. This was an interesting site to behold.

Last but not least the Activision booth always had people swarming around it, and for good reason: they had a multiplayer demo of Doom III to play. Check out the full impressions on demo here.

The BYOC area of the place was packed out, with many people coming in by the minute, and this is just the first day of Quakecon. This year, Quakecon has a lot of attractions, and a big reward to any players that are good enough to complete for the grand prize. If you live in the Dallas/Fort Worth area, check it out, because it will provide you with some entertainment that doesn’t cost you anything. Each year Quakecon tops the previous year, and I wonder what is in store for us next year.