ASUS Republic of Gamers Convention: Part 2

While Intel, Kingston, ASUS and BenQ were a lot of fun to listen to, the star of the show was Kyle Bennett, of Hard|OCP fame. The initially huge news from the LAN came a few days prior when ASUS announced that Kyle had personally purchased everyone in attendances’ seats, ensuring that each person who came to RoG Con was doing so free of charge.

Think what you will about Kyle, and I certainly had my reservations coming into the workshop, but the man knows what he is talking about. This was demonstrated time and time again when he would field a question and then go into great length explaining his answer. There were a few questions that drew his sarcastic side but even in giving the person who asked the question a hard time, he then would approach the actual answering of the question with fairness to all involved.

He pulled no punches whether he was discussing NVIDIA, AMD, Intel or ATI. It was an enjoyable session that was followed by what can only be described as an orgy of swag. Kyle brought with him video cards both awesome and bad, power supplies, cases and peripherals. BFG was kind enough to send along 600 t-shirts as well. With only a fraction of that number in attendance, this provided every single person with at least 2 shirts. Not a bad haul.

In the middle of Kyle’s workshop (Q&A), he invited both Corsair and NVIDIA to come up and discuss a few things related to specific questions regarding GPUs and memory. NVIDIA came up and started to show off their implementation of PhysX (which can now be downloaded for all owners of 8800 series cards and above!).

After Kyle, ASUS gave away A LOT of good hardware. Included were motherboards (RoG boards at that!), Xonar sound cards, Intel extreme edition processors, video cards and of course shirts. They then held a Jeopardy game with the winner getting one of each! Sans a case and power supply, one lucky winner walked away with a pretty nice PC.

Once everything was said and done, and the masses were queuing for the BFG shirts, one of the coolest things I saw all weekend took place. When one attendee walked up to Kyle with his PC side panel and asked him to sign it, Kyle asked his name and proceeded to sign the door. While this doesn’t seem like much, and in the grand scheme of things it isn’t, I can guarantee that the kid with the side panel won’t soon forget what Kyle did for him and I’m sure he’s displaying it proudly now.

At the end of the LAN, when I was heading to the airport, I looked back and considered myself lucky to have been in attendance. This wasn’t a regular LAN. It wasn’t a QuakeCON. This was as if ASUS came to Asylum LAN and brought their marketing might with them. This had a grassroots feel to it that I can’t imagine we will see in the next RoG Con.

I think a lot of this can be contributed to ASUS not doing a very good job of marketing the event but if you ask anyone in attendance, I don’t think you will find that they minded all that much. Tourneys were played and tourneys were won. When everything wrapped up on Sunday, every single person walked away with something. Either it was a shirt or in some cases, gaming notebooks.

It was a success for everybody involved and while ASUS might have been upset at the number of gamers that actually showed up, the atmosphere was a positive one that ensured everyone that wanted to speak with representatives of their favorite companies had the chance. From a books standpoint, I am sure ASUS’ accountants are pissed but I can’t see this going down as anything but a resounding success. While larger is sometimes better, in the case of last weeks LAN, a smaller, more intimate atmosphere was just was we all needed.

Thanks to ASUS, Intel, Kingston, BenQ and Hard|OCP for everything that they gave to this event to make it what it was… a great time for all.

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