Anyways as life went on I started getting better and better at Halo PC. I soon found out the MX440 could barely play the game at decent framerates. I had to upgrade my video card. I searched around and found the best deal for 200.00 was a AMD 9600XT. After I stuck that in to my computer It was a whole new world. I found out that video cards meant a lot when playing whatever game. My love for AMD started then and has stayed with me throughout the years.
I found a bunch of people that were also good at the game and we formed our own clan ( -X- ) Xtreme Clan. We started challenging teams in leagues such as KW, TWL and TCLN. We got quite good and started moving up the ranks. We got to the 1st position in TWL in the CTF 5v5 and 5v5 slayer category.
After doing that for awhile I had a friend of mine named Devour showed me a link to a LAN called PDXLAN in Portland OR. Shortly after that I registered and couldn't wait to go to my first LAN and play games for competitvely. I was a little nervous at first going to one of these things without knowing anyone there. I started going to these PDXLAN's and noticed that some people were customizing their computers also called modding. It was pretty cool to see what people would create. I started being so excited to go to these PDXLAN's just to see the cool custom computers people would make...A lot of them were watercooled. I started to look up to these guys and put them on this high pedestal. Shortly It dawned on me. I wanted to make something cool that I could bring to these LAN's and show off. I compare it to someone fixing up a 69 Camaro and taking it to car shows. My first attempt at modding a computer was pretty good. I disassembled my computer ( a Thermaltake Armor+) and had it powder coated blue. I built a little stand on the bottom to raise it up a few inches so the radiator could breathe. I put a custom watercool loop inside and it looked like this.
Sometime after this the AMD 5870 came out and supported triple monitor setup's. AMD called this Eyefinity. I was very curious and had to try it out asap. I went and bought 2 5870's at my local Fry's store to prepare for my triple monitor setup. Shortly after that I went to PDXLAN and while I was there I ran down to the nearest Costco and purchased 3 monitors. I brought them back to PDXLAN and this is where my first Eyefinity experience happened. As soon as I started playing MW2 in Eyefinity @ 5760X1080p I knew I was hooked on multi-monitor gaming. Its a whole new level of immersion when you play games. You can see so much more of the maps/levels. I was the first one to ever display Eyefinity at PDXLAN or a GeforceLAN or a PAX BYOC or an Intel InfernalLAN.
Here is one of the first video's I ever took of Eyefinity.
After that build I built this one.
This one won a mod contest at PDXLAN and was featured on CPU magazine Oct 2011.
About 10 of us from the clan NerdRagePros went down to Nvidia's Geforce LAN and they were handing out the magazine to everyone and it was pretty cool alot of people were surprised that the computer on the front cover of the magazine was at the event. I also got a little harassed but in a good way for bringing my AMD Eyefinity setup to a Nvidia sponsored event.
So shortly after this event I had sent some links to the magazine , LANs I was attending and some video footage of me at the GeForce LAN and the people at AMD thought it was pretty awesome that I was doing all this and getting a lot of attention from it. They thanked me by sending me a 6990. At the time I was running 2 6970's. I put it in my computer with a 6970 for trifire. At this time this was the most powerful graphics setup I had in my computer and could handle every game I threw at it.
After winning the CPU magazine mod contest I got kinda noticed by a few manufactures and they said if I ever needed anything to let them know. Thats when I got my first sponsors. My very first sponsor was Kingston. The sent me 2 HyperX 128GB SSD's. These were retailing around 600.00 each at the time and they also sent me some ram that had their own watercooling blocks on them. I thought this was coolest thing ever. I installed those SSD's in Raid 0 and it was amazing how fast I loaded into games compared to my friends with mechanical hard drives. They were quite jealous and soon after started getting SSD's themselves.
Anyways as I moved on and still enjoying so many games in Eyefinity. Especially the Battlefield series. Since Battlefield Bad Company 2 I believe they supported Eyefinity right out of the box. I posted one of my BFBC2 videos on Youtube and Johan Andersson and a few others had tweeted about it and Battlefield used it in one of their blogs and that video got over 100,000 views. I was quite excited to showcase Eyefinity and BFBC2 to that many people.
There were some games even today that don't support Eyefnity. One of them is the Call of Duty series. Yes every single one the the Call of Duty games released to date does not support Eyefinity. I had to use 3 party programs such as Dopefish's Widescreen fixer or Hayden's Flawless Widescreen fixer to properly play any of those games. YES I am calling you out Call of Duty franchises.
Moving on to my next custom computer build. I had seen this case at Geforce LAN in 2011 and also at PDXLAN. This case is the Azzatek Genesis 9000. I had this vision in my head of an all white build with chrome throughout the computer. This was the first images of my newest build called White Lightning. I call it this because its a lot of white and all the leds in it with light bouncing everywhere is the Lightning. I started emailng a lot of manufactures asking for sponsorship for my new build. Some sponsors tell me no or they are all sponsored out at this time or some don't even return an email for whatever reason. The sponsors that have helped me out are Adata ( 2 SSD's) , Enermax ( 16 White TB vegas fans ), EK watercooling ( a lot of the watercooling parts found in my new build ), Crucial ( 16 GB Tactical Tracer Ram with Blue Leds) , Azzatek ( the Azzatek Genesis 9000 in white) and Club3D ( they have recently given me 2 295X2's ).
Here is a video of my latest Creation.
If you have any questions or comments please leave them below.
