LPANE Nor'Easter 2005 LAN Party

Over the course of the two days, we ran various contests to hand out all of the excellent prizes provided by our sponsors.  These contests varied from straight-out raffles to booth races, such as the first attendee to come to our booth wearing a HotHardware "t"-shirt, and we also sponsored an Unreal Tournament 2004, umm, tournament.  The action was fast and furious, and we even entered our own Robert "Stealth" Maloney into a few matches.  Even with the crazy gear he came with, Rob found he was no match for some of the Nor'Easter attendees, and bowed to their superiority.  Sometimes it's tough having a day job, and not being get in all the gaming that we'd like!  Pictured below are HotHardware's list of winners with their prize in hand:

Greg Militello Corsair 512MB Voyager	Jared Kuipers Corsair 512MB Voyager	Evan Goncalo Radeon X800 Pro
Corey Davin DFI Lanparty 875P-T	Dana Tellier Radeon X800 Pro	Alex Goldman Radeon X800 XL
Jeff Scudder Corsair 1GB RAM	Mark Wyre DFI 925X-T2 + X800 XL	Peter Cahill Abit AA8XE + X600

Of course, we weren't the only prize-givers, as LPANE had an entire table of goodies from the sponsors as well.  On each day, the throng of players were gathered up towards one end of the auditorium to see if they had won anything.  There were a few kinks here and there with the ceremony, but eventually everything was handed out.  Some of the larger prizes, including the Abit Fatality AA8XE, were awarded to the first and second place UT2004 participants, and the rest were awarded by Brian "Shady" McQuaid to pre-paid players as part of the big send-off on Sunday.  We also hooked the LPANE folks up with an Intel i925XE board and P4 560 combo, as well as a couple of Radeon X800s and a DFI LanParty mobo (thanks Intel!  thanks ATI!  thanks DFI!) to give away to pre-registered attendees.  Todd Larise walked away with the LAN Party board, David Burns won himself a Radeon X800 Pro, and Justin Thomas scored big with the Intel kit...

Further adding to our showcase of the event, we've got a picture of the winner of our low-end video card contest.  This was the system that Dana Tellier (pictured above) actually brought up to our booth for review.  Dana's gaming on a dual P3 500 system with a Riva TNT based card was grounds enough for winning our contest.  And that's Peter Cahill on the floor following one of our booth races.  He was so eager to win this contest, that he literally slid under our front table.  Way to go, Peter!

Our final two contests were for some major bragging rights; one for a combo package consisting of a DFI LanParty 925X-T2 with an ATi Radeon X800XL, and the other for the custom rig.  As you can see, we were quite popular with the crowd, as each member checked their raffle tickets in hopes of winning the first combo.  The lucky ones were faced with a task, find us any two items that had the words "hot" and "hardware" on them.  After some initial scrambling, and one failed attempt (that's LANParty, not HOTParty, Adam), Mark Wyre had the winning combination, borrowing a bag of Chex Mix and an ATi X600 card from a friend.

   
Matt Hobbs (bottom left) Lucky Winner of The HotHardware.com LAN Rig!
Pentium 4 3GHz OC'ed to 3.6GHz, ATi X800 XL Graphics, DFI LANParty 925X Mobo

Finally, the coup de grace.  With Davo heading the show, attendees were probed to find which lucky (or is it unlucky?) gamer had the lowest end CPU in the room.  While most of the systems we looked over were indeed power-rigs, the kind of system that games fly on, we were intent on upgrading one lost soul who really needed it.  After waves of elimination, there was just one man left standing - Matthew Hobbs.  Matt was using a 300 MHz AMD K6-2 coupled with a Voodoo 5 video card, and if we heard him right, he was getting close to 20fps in CounterStrike.  Needless to say, we got him straightened right out and sent him gaming on the winning rig.