Crucial Prizes at the next LAN!

[Sid]

I have spoken to Crucial and they have very kindly offered to donate some gear to the club which we can use as prizes at the next LAN.

Up for grabs will be:

- Crucial(R) Ballistix(TM) PC3200 (DDR400) 1GB memory kit (2 x 512MB)
- Crucial(R) Ballistix(TM) T-shirts (five)
- Crucial(R) Ballistix(TM) optical mouse pads (three)
- Crucial(R) Ballistix(TM) posters (four)
- Crucial(R) Ballistix(TM) large poster (one)
- Crucial(R) Ballistix(TM) balloons (ten)
- Crucial(R) Ballistix(TM) memory pigs (seven)

http://www.crucial.com/ballistix/

Cheers.

[gor]

Does this mean no cake? DANG!

Nice work craig, this is seriously, a very strong promotional tool. My whole marketing campaign (marketing degree ftw) would be based around these prizes and the CS tourney (every second male owns or has played CS).

[DAve]

That's fantastic news, presumably it's for the March lan then?

[Sid]

Nice work craig, this is seriously, a very strong promotional tool. My whole marketing campaign (marketing degree ftw) would be based around these prizes and the CS tourney (every second male owns or has played CS).

Yeah, good point, Mr Marketing. Some dedicated "Counter-strike tournament - Crucial memory prize!" posters would really bring people in, I'm sure.

That's fantastic news, presumably it's for the March lan then?

It was actually for this one (February).

[Bluepixie]

Craig that is some awesome work there! I'm quite stunned at the prizes!

Including Crucial in the posters sounds like a good idea as well as on the flyers at the fair. Man that's exciting!

[Phizz]

Can you place the 1gig of ram on the worst comp competition please?

[Uuurrahh]

lol Phizz, I was just thinking that. I think we should give the RAM to Phizz so his comp isn't so shit :P

[Sid]

I was thinking the RAM is quite a big prize to give to any one thing so perhaps we could put that towards a new server for the club? The mouse mats for the CS tournament the t-shirts for DoW and LFS.

[Uuurrahh]

^That's true. Server would be a good use for it. As you say, RAM is a bit big to give away as a prize.

[YegaDoyai]

how about the memory goes to the person that can leverage the biggest performance gain on thier computer using the memory. That would actually make sense.

[Chesire Cat]

Three Cheers For Sid! :d
Hiphip Hurrah! Hiphip Hurrah! Hiphip Hurrah!

[Sideshow]

how about the memory goes to the person that can leverage the biggest performance gain on thier computer using the memory. That would actually make sense.

Who would that be?

[YegaDoyai]

one of three:

Me
Sid
Jan

Nonone else can yeild the same OC performance.

(except both Jan and Sid have better memory than that on offer - can you see a pattern to my thoughts?)

[LastChanceHotel]

But Jan has only half the amount of RAM that he needs - can you see a pattern to my thoughts too? :)

Anyway, a fun (if probably not likely to be chosen) competition would be 'best overclock' using said memory? Best memtest86 timing?

[Sid]

Let's buy a cheap 939 motherboard such as the Asus A8V-VM (http://www.eclipsecomputers.com/product.aspx?code=MBA-A8VVM&af=50) @ £32 and a cheap 939 processor (£50). Stick the 1GB of memory in and we've got a nice server for £80.

Well, we'd need a hard drive - something like a 320GB one, which would cost around £60-70. If that money is not available now, it should certainly be available after the February LAN.

[DAve]

Let's buy a cheap 939 motherboard such as the Asus A8V-VM (http://www.eclipsecomputers.com/product.aspx?code=MBA-A8VVM&af=50) @ £32 and a cheap 939 processor (£50). Stick the 1GB of memory in and we've got a nice server for £80.
I'm all for upgrading the server, I think Jan has a plan for this already. The last I heard Jan was trying to get some bits together from the Xeons he got from the states. Any word on these, or what happened to the plans for the servers, Jan?

[Sid]

I'm all for upgrading the server, I think Jan has a plan for this already. The last I heard Jan was trying to get some bits together from the Xeons he got from the states. Any word on these, or what happened to the plans for the servers, Jan?

We could probably get a dual/quad xeon motherboard from ebay without too much hassle, but it would be expensive and would want ECC registered memory, which is expensive and hard to come by. A dual P4 machine could be do-able, but by the time you measure the performance against a single 939 CPU and weigh up the extra cost of a dual P4 motherboard, we might be better just going with a single athlon 64 based system like the one I suggested.

[DAve]

but it would be expensive and would want ECC registered memory, which is expensive and hard to come by.
Damn, I always forget about the registered memory problem.

[LastChanceHotel]

it would be expensive and would want ECC registered memory, which is expensive and hard to come by.

Yes, this is the case unfortunately.

An A64 system would be doable, and probably a good idea. We currently have one athlon XP 2400+ machine which does pretty well for the player numbers we have, but we have no file server (last LAN I used my RAIDed 400GB partition on my desktop to serve files, which had the unfortunate side effect of causing frame rate drops when people were leeching at 50-60MB/sec) currently. I think getting another A64 and a motherboard would be an excellent idea.

On another note, if a 2.8ghz P4 is fast enough (remember, multipliers are unlocked on these chips), we already have a processor (or three!). We could pick up a motherboard for £30 for this, we have memory, we can get a cheap PSU...

Our options summarised are thus:

1.dual/quad xeon (not worthwhile in my opinion)
- got processors
- need motherboard. Probably £200+
- need ECC RAM. probably £100/GB
- need hard disk (£70)
- need case and meaty PSU (£100 let's say)
- Total Cost £470 or thereabouts

2. Athlon 64 machine (doable, but any better than option 3?)
- need processor. (my brother is selling his 3000+ 939 for £30, this could make it trivial to get hold of a processor)
- need motherboard. probably ~£30.
- don't need RAM, assuming prize is used in server.
- need hard disk (£70)
- need case and bog standard psu (£20-30)
- Total Cost £150-160

3. Pentium 4 machine (cheap and cheerful, can even make 3 for the same cost per unit!)
- got processors. am told they'll clock to 3.6ghz no bother :D
- need motherboard. £20
- don't need RAM, assuming prize is used in server.
- need hard disk (£70)
- need case and bog standard PSU (£20-30)
- Total Cost £110-120

Anyway the 320GB hard disk is on order so I can get things pulled together in time for the LAN - I've discussed this with Ru. EDIT: on hold until monday committee meeting

Jan

[Sid]

Recieved everything but the memory today. Quite a nice little pack for small prizes.

These should make for nice little prizes:

5 black crucial t-shirts
3 crucial mouse mats
7 stress-ball-style crucial pigs :D

[Fyndir]

3 crucial mouse mats

One of which will be given to "Most Fyndirish Person" at the LAN. >_>

[DAve]

One of which will be given to "Most Fyndirish Person" at the LAN. >_>
You might just have competition, I propose a "Fyndir lookalike compo" for the lan.

Oh, and I really want to get my hands on the Crucial pigs. I've got a brain and a foam guinness on my monitor at home, the pig would feel right at home :D

[Fyndir]

You might just have competition, I propose a "Fyndir lookalike compo" for the lan.

That would be very odd. =P

and scary...

[Sid]

I picked up the memory today at it's turned out to be 2x512MB PC3200 2-2-2-6 rather than the PC4000 2.5-4-4-8 they told me we were getting, but it's all good - not going to complain. The PC3200 stuff is good quality and would probably get to DDR500 anyway.

[Phizz]

Can you explain what the numbers mean for the unitiated among us?

[Sid]

Can you explain what the numbers mean for the unitiated among us?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDR_RAM

[YegaDoyai]

Don't fit your machine anyway phill.

Tis a might better than my current stuff, gimme!

[Phizz]

:-P mean Yega. I could ebay it and get that gfx you were recommending!

[Greasel_burger]

why dont we have a bunch of posters for the prizes at the next lan? cheap and pretty good prizes