Gaming (cont’d)/Henri’s PC

FiringSquad: AMD has always had a loyal following among the gaming community. Why do you think this is so? Do you think your participation in the Professional Gaming League (PGL) helped?

Henri Richard: Well I think that the reason why we’ve always had such a great reception among the gaming community is because they’re technology savvy people. We’ve always been in the general market, but somewhat outdone by the heavy marketing of our competitor. But when it comes to the reality of performance, value, and real innovation you’re talking to a technology savvy user and the core of our marketing covers reality and in reality [inaudible] are better, that we’ve been leading in many areas and I think that they also recognize that they get a better value out of an AMD system. So I think that’s the reason.

Also, we have a very open approach to the entire add-in system. And so typically you’ll see some really great things from the motherboard guys and the AMD infrastructure. Whereas our competitor has the tendency to try to do everything themselves and somewhat stifle competition and innovation on their platform.

Often independently from the processor performance, the overall platform that you can find around the AMD infrastructures are just better.

As far as sponsoring the gaming community obviously I think that’s very important for us, particularly since we now have the Athlon FX of really great products for that very high end community. I believe that with the Athlon FX platforms you can actually be unbeatable because of the response time of the system and so I want to do as much as we can afford to in terms of sponsoring the gaming community.

FiringSquad: Earlier you said that you actually build your own gaming rigs. Can you tell us a little about your PC/building experience, and your current gaming system?

Henri Richard: Sure. Yeah so I always build my own systems I like to plan my builds, I like to select components. I typically, you know I’m blessed with many connections within the industry so I work with partners, that, you know, if they need beta testers…[I’m there]

But my configuration today is, well I have two configurations. I have a water cooled Athlon XP 3200+. I’m using the Koolance water-cooling system. On that system I’ve got an NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 and 2GB of memory and there’s two 250GB Maxtor Serial ATA hard drives. So that’s my XP 3200 and I just finished putting together an Athlon 64 FX 51 that’s in a Thermaltake box. It’s not water-cooled but it’s a very cool box, with seven thermostatically controlled fans, very low RPM fans. In that one I’ve got an NVIDIA 5950, the latest one, and also dual 250GB Maxtor drives and 4GB of memory and I just purchased the latest Sound Blaster ZS, the Audigy 2 ZS. I have to confess that I haven’t been fortunate to, well I’ve been on the road for two weeks so I haven’t had the chance to actually setup the system and install the software that I want on it yet.

But I like to test. I like, well my systems are constantly in a state of evolution. I have seven different platforms at home that I keep rotating. I also have a home server that I run 24/7 that I use as a gaming server. I also fitted it with an FM radio emitter. That’s my own private radio station without any advertisements on it that’s basically using Winamp and scanning a database of MP3 files that I made out of my CD collection of over 12,000 titles.

FiringSquad: Wow that’s pretty impressive

Henri Richard: Yeah, it’s great. I’m surprised, you know that FM card is like $150 bucks and I’m surprised that there aren’t more people that use that because every time I talk to friends or people in the industry about it they think it’s a cool idea because a lot of people don’t want advertisements when you listen to the radio and it’s [inaudible] and it’s doing 50 milliwatts. You know it gives me basically, the range is about half a mile from my house and it gets great reception, it’s really cool. I expect that one of these days it will be a standard feature in multimedia PCs.