The Sponsors

An event of this size wouldn’t be possible without our sponsors, who deserve our thanks for making it all possible:

EA

EA has made this event what it is from the very first year. Not only do they organize the gaming portion of the event, but they bring lots of prizes for the participants from the various companies, ensuring that everyone goes home with something.

This year, EA’s team organized a Command and Conquer 3 tournament to huge success. So successful in fact that it ended up taking way more time than we anticipated and we had to cal the match with 3 teams left. Otherwise, we would’ve been there all night, with no time to hand out the awards.

This year’s tournament was called by Sky Lin, and MCd by Henry Hsieh, Marketing Manager from EA Taiwan. Henry has been a great supporter of our tournament over the past few years, along with Jack Lin, general manager of EA Taiwan.

TCA

The Taipei Computer Association represents the Computer Industry in Taiwan and is one of the organizers of Computex. They bring a lot of the local Taiwan press to the event and have been our supporters since the very beginning. We appreciate having their support, as it means our event is officially sanctioned by the Computex organizers and brings us broader industry support. This support has allowed us to grow the event to its current size. Thanks to Enoch Du, Angie Tsai and Sakura Yang for their continued support of our event over the years.

Shuttle

As the company that invented the small form factor market back in 2001 with their SV24, Shuttle is highly respected among gamers and hardware enthusiasts. In many ways they’re the Apple of the industry, with stylish designs that are very powerful, delivering performance as good as any full-sized ATX system, yet small enough to fit comfortably on a small desk, or as the centerpiece of a home theater entertainment system. Particularly with their innovative heatpipe and cooling technologies, the Shuttle XPC is really a marvel of modern industrial design.

Synonymous with PC gaming, their XPC’s look cool and have been toted by gamers out to LAN parties for years, offering much of the same performance of a larger system without the bulk. Shuttle monitors are also suitable for LAN gamers, complete with handy carrying handle. This commitment to the small PC market has paid off for Shuttle-they are considered the industry leaders in SFF PC manufacturing. We have to thank Aaron Chen at Shuttle Taiwan for his effort in making this year’s sponsorship happen for Shuttle.

Sapphire

Sapphire is no stranger to PC gamers being one of ATI’s oldest board partners and enjoys Tier One board partner status among enthusiasts. In fact, ATI has contracted Sapphire in the past to produce all of their Built By ATI cards end users purchase at retail outlets like Newegg and Zipzoomfly. Sapphire’s parent company, PC Partner, is a manufacturing powerhouse, producing a wide range of video cards and motherboards for OEMs. They’ve been so successful that Sapphire has entered into the motherboard market. Their PURE line of motherboards have been on the market for a few years now, and are designed to deliver good performance along with reliability all at an attractive price point.

Sapphire is probably best known though for their lineup of high-end video cards. Besides offering standard Radeon cards that are built on the basic ATI reference design, Sapphire also produces two higher-end SKUs known as the Toxic and Ultimate Edition. Sapphire’s Toxic cards are designed in cooperation with Thermaltake and feature liquid cooling. These cards are also usually overclocked out-of-the-box for better performance

They always take their participation very seriously: I received a call from Robert Ng, their head of RnD in Hong Kong the week before the event. With this kind of support and commitment, it is no doubt they continue to stay on top of the world-wide VGA market. We also have to thank Cathy Yu for her continued support of this event and FiringSquad over the years.

Razer

Gamers have long been familiar with Razer, a manufacturer of premium-quality PC peripherals, including mice, keyboards and mousepads. Their company motto is “Built for Gamers, By Gamers” which is an accurate reflection: their CEO Min-Liang Tan is an avid gamer and no doubt this spirit is instilled throughout the whole company. Razer is also a great supporter of LAN events world-wide. If you are into attending large LAN parties or are part of a clan, no doubt you are aware of Razer’s commitment to PC gaming. For the Industry Invitational, Razer provided all of the participants with Krait mice and Mantis gaming pads and also gave away Tarantula keyboards to some lucky winners.