AppLAN Results

UPDATE: Pictures are up here!

I must say that AppLAN IX was a total success in my book. Everything ran pretty much on time and all of the tournaments had great turnouts. I need to give some big congratulations to [A]ssisted [S]uicide for pretty much pwning the CS: Source tournament yet again. These guys operate very well together, and really demonstrated the power of team work. Also, I need to thank NVIDIA for getting us some great prizes, especially Jacob and Jeff. Those guys ROCK! Lastly, if anyone found a Sony digital camera out there while cleaning up, please let me know. Our image gallery is hungry for those pictures.

The next big event with the Appalachian State University Gaming Club is slated for April 19th, I believe. AppLAN X will probably be the best LAN ever, so make sure to put it on your calendar. We'll have details as they come.

This event was really neat, because it was the first one after Christmas and a lot of people had new gear. Vista is starting to take off, and I would say that atleast 10% of the room was running it. It was interesting to note however, that most every version was the 32 bit one. I've been pushing the 64 bit version for a while now, and everyone should know that your 32 bit product key works with 64 bit just as well. So go grab another 2GB or 4GB of RAM and start loving your computer again. We'll have more about Vista in a dedicated article soon.

Something I always try to notice is what kinds of PC's people are running at these events. Most of the PC's I saw were built from off the shelf components, just like Nordic PC's machines. The difference was that the Njord 775 that we brought to the event was the smallest full ATX PC there. I did see a Micro-ATX machine or two, and with techologies like Hybrid SLI on the horizon, it will be interesting to see if the motherboard manufacturers will finally provide us with an enthusiast-grade product for smaller PC's. 

I don't usally like to talk too much about other OEM's, but one in particular deserves a little note from this event. Dell shipped the gaming club two Inspiron XPS notebooks with Core 2 Duos and NVIDIA's 7950GTX mobile graphics. One of these ran everything that we threw at it wonderfully, and did so without scolding the table beneath it. The other was not so happy, and was consistantly rebooting, crashing, and even blue-screening in Vista. We think it has to do with the video card, but without a Dell representative there to help us, we resorted to leaving it powered off. Of course, the Njord 775 ran everything that was thrown at it without issue.

Well that's about it until I can find my camera and upload some images. Again, April 19th is the next LAN, and I'm sure it will be bigger and better than this past one, so be sure to save that day for gaming.