The Texas Gaming festival is a successful LAN event that has been taking place in Dallas, Texas for the past few years. Over the years, it has become one of the top most visited and sponsored LAN events in the nation with attendance easily surpassing the 500-attendee attendance. This year was no different. In fact, this was perhaps the most successful attempt at a LAN event especially when ATI decided to launch its X850 XT PE 512MB graphics card officially.

With a regular dose of gaming that one would expect from a LAN party, this event was made special, thanks to OCZ, ATI and numerous other sponsors. We mentioned ATI and OCZ particularly because they held a rather successful overclocking competition between the world’s top three overclockers – Eric Kronies (OP Painter – United States), Charles Worth (Fugger – United States) and Sami Makinen (Macci – Finland). ATI flew these enthusiasts over to Texas from their respected locations just for an exclusive head to head competition throughout the event.

Before we take a look at some of the extreme events at overclocking, let’s discuss a little bit about ATI’s 512MB product launch. According to ATI, this wasn’t an official product launch, but it was more of a technology preview. The technology is of course the ability to add 256MB of additional memory on the graphics cards. Despite that, ATI was well prepared and made the event more or less a product launch in itself. The company managed to integrate additional on-board memory without the latency causing performance issues. ATI also explained that using GDDR3 memory chips (to make-up for the latency issues) is far too expensive to be put into a practical market scenario. And considering the prices and availability of high-end cards currently, ATI was probably right not to launch another product.

While ATI failed to disclose any significant details about the X850 XT PE 512MB, it did theorize the performance numbers. ATI actually had a display board that tested the latest PC games and according to the graphics card maker, a gamer would notice as much as 20 percent to 50 percent of performance boost at higher quality settings (1600x1200, 6xAA, 16xAF) just by doubling the on-board RAM. Of course majority of the games that will take advantage of additional memory include Doom III, Far Cry, Half-Life 2 and others that are built upon the latest physics engines. The physical memory would come in handy under higher textured maps where the card is not usually capable of handing such large quantities of data and sends it to system memory for processing. Although system memory is faster, it does have its hit on the overall performance of the game. The 512MB memory will work to eliminate just that. Let’s not forget that the next generation of games should efficiently take advantage of 512MB on-board memory due to the demands by the actual software (the upcoming Unreal Engine).

While ATI was brave enough to display their 512MB version, NVIDIA, on the other hand, is also rumored to announce a similar card soon. We are fairly certain that it will just be a "technology preview", but image of the prototype cards have already started to appear. We are, however, expecting 512MB cards to hit the retail channel sometime in summer. In fact, we are fairly certain ATI and NVIDIA’s next generation of high-end cards will contain 512MB of on-board memory.

LAN parties are usually an event for gamers to show off their systems, and this event was also quite popular at the Texas Gaming Festival. OCZ, ATI, AMD and All American Computers held the "Pimp My Rig" contest and picked a lucky gamer in need of a serious upgrade to his system. The system was of course powered by an AMD FX53 microprocessor, OCZ PC3700 Platinum system memory, ATI X850XT PE 512MB graphics card and OCZ PowerStream 520W power supply unit. The system also included the latest and greatest in storage and other necessary components to complete the system. All American Computers did the honor of painting and finishing the final case for the winner.

The overclocking competition was extreme, to say the least. The aforementioned enthusiasts literally redefined the meaning of overclocking. The task was simple – try to score as high as possible in 3Dmark05. ATI, being the event sponsor, provided the competitors with their X850 XT PE 512MB graphics cards and their "Bullhead" prototype motherboards based on the Radeon XPRESS 200 chipset. OCZ also provided the overclockers with their 520W PowerStream power supply and their VX (Voltage extreme) system memory. Although none of the three competitors were able to set any world records (due to the issues with limited capabilities of the prototype motherboards), they did manage to entertain the crowd throughout the event. Eric Kronies, however, ended up being the "winner" with 9,047 as his final benchmark score in 3Dmark05. The remaining two racers did work hard to break his record, but just weren’t lucky enough to surpass the score. Worth had Reggie Wing (Chilly1) while Kronies and Makinen had David Hilton on their sides for regular maintenance of their extraordinary cooling systems. To give you an idea, the microprocessors (FX53 – sponsored by AMD) were cooled as low as –191 degrees Celsius at 3.754GHz. ATI’s X850 XT PE 512MB cards were operating as high as 850MHz engine/700MHz core speeds. It was extreme, indeed.

After this brief introduction, let’s take you through some of the events with a mini photo shoot…

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