Sport championships have proved to be excellent places for advertising of various products: from food to high-tech equipment. With popularization of computer games the so-called cyber-athletics contests are becoming yet another place for ads, but this time for hardware and technology companies.

Hardware Makers Address Gamers

The Cyberathlete Extreme World Championships in Dallas, Texas, that will be held on July 28-31, 2004, will be sponsored by leading technology and retail companies: Intel, NVIDIA, Hitachi and CompUSA. However, a lot of other firms sponsor gamers and gaming contests: a leading mainboard maker ABIT and one of the most popular memory brands Kingston will provide their equipment to a number of promising teams, such as Dignitas, NoA, EG and Rival, who will take part in the Cyberathlete Extreme World Championships.

The companies who support Cyberathlete championship not only tend to showcase their latest innovations, such as the latest Intel’s Pentium 4 processors, NVIDIA’s  GeForce 6800-series graphics cards, ABIT’s AA8-DuraMax mainboards or Corsair’s DDR2 667MHz memory modules, in action, but also try to exhibit their product lines in order to attract attention of gamers, who are believed to be the most performance-hungry customers.

Throughout the recent years gaming events turned into the combination of gaming and technology, as computer games and professional computer gaming become more widely-spread causing the demand for powerful computer hardware to rise dramatically. Nowadays graphics and microprocessor companies offer gamers special flavours of their products aimed to deliver maximum performance at price-points of $500 - $1000, unbelievable sums for computer components just a decade ago.

NVIDIA’s SLI, ABIT’s Fatal1ty on Display

NVIDIA Corp. is expected to publicly demonstrate its much-anticipated multi-GPU rendering technology – SLI – on the Cyberathlete Extreme World Championships for the first time, underlining the importance of gaming events for the company. The Santa Clara, California-based graphics powerhouse said it would allow visitors to try the SLI themselves, which is a sign that the tech is nearly ready to ship commercially.

ABIT, who tends to become the No.1 maker of mainboards for gamers and enthusiasts, will exclusively disclose the details about its Fatal1ty mainboards product line at the event and will also held a number of contests among visitors and gamers who use ABIT’s products in computers they use on the championship. In addition to the live demos and product displays, Corsair and ABIT together will run an Overclocking Clinic for gamers interested in maximizing the performance of their rigs. The Overclocking Clinic will be held in the Corsair-ABIT joint booth at intervals throughout the event.

NVIDIA’s SLI is a tech that will allow two high-end graphics cards to work in parallel delivering exceptional performance, but requiring exhaustive investments of around $1000 or more for graphics sub-system along. ABIT’s Fatal1ty mainboards are projected to be tailored for extreme gamers offering maximum performance at appropriate price-point.

Cyber Olympics Ahead?

As the technology industry and the so-called cyberathletics mature, more common features between the “real” and “virtual” sport are likely to emerge, analysts say. In future, hardware companies will pay even more attention on the game contests, as more and more observers monitor the cyber-sport these days.