Sponsors' Booths

The companies that had booths were the ones supplying the hardware for the tournament PC's used in the competition. I would describe the environment to be a mini trade-show feeling, because there were about 7-8 companies displaying booths and the regular goodies you would get in a trade show, such as tee shirts, stickers, posters, CD-roms, free magazines and other knick-knacks.

As I strolled around in the booths area, I first stopped by ABIT's booth. ABIT showcased their Radeon 9800XT and 9600XT video cards along with their three latest motherboards. Of note, ABIT also held their own gaming event in North America, read about our coverage of it here.

ABIT's mini-booth

Serious ABIT hardware

Pair of ABIT motherboards AG8 Pro and KV8 MAX3

Increasingly popular RAM manufacturer, OCZ (view their RAM lineup), also has a booth in. They supplied the 512MB of RAM that power the tourney PC's. On their display table, they had their top three RAM dual-channel RAM types for display as well as OCZ's first entry into the ever-growing small form factor market. It is an aesthetically pleasing design with brushed aluminum finish and clear acrylic accents, with a lot of drive-bay expandability, with three 5.25" drive bays and one vertical 3.5" bay.

OCZ's SFF PC and its internal view

OCZ high-end RAM line-up

Gigabyte (click to view products by Gigabyte) had their booth in the corner, near the couches under the camo tent. You can see them diversifying their product line, as they showed off an 802.11g 4-port wireless router and the 3D Cooler-Ultra CPU heat pipe and fans (click to read Brandon's review of this unit). Check out one of the close-up images of the 3D Cooler in my hand, this thing is quite hefty! Gigabyte also lined up their top two motherboards, one for Athlon 64 and one for Pentium 4.

Gigabyte's mini-booth display

Athlon 64 and P4 mobos by Gigabyte

The GN-B49G 802.11g wireless router by Gigabyte

Gigabyte's PCI-slot eating GV-N595U

Close-up of Gigabyte's 3D cooler

On the other side of the Gigabyte booth was the Viewsonic booth (click to view all products by Viewsonic). Here they showed off one of their LCD TV's with integrated speakers, a 19" LCD monitor hooked up to a Playstation 2 and finally a 2.1 speaker system with subwoofers. Sure the speakers had a great form, but did it perform well?

Viewsonic's mini-booth, yes those are 2.1 speakers