BlizzCon 2009 – The Vendor Booths

The ASUS Booth

Being at this year’s BlizzCon event has been almost surreal. Back in May when the tickets to the event went on sale, gamers from all over the world got online to pick up one of the 26,000 tickets. Even at $125 per ticket, the 2009 BlizzCon event sold out in esentially less than a minute!

Legit Reviews has been covering BlizzCon ever since it’s conception in 2005 and has seen first hand how the convention has grown and matured. We arrived on the first day thinking that the record breaking crowds would be a bit too much for the organizers. Well, we really had no reason to fear or doubt the amazing organizers. The first day of BlizzCon 2009 has run extremly smoothly. The newly announced expansion pack for World of Warcraft and new characters class for Diablo III still have the crowd buzzing. We will have more floor coverage as the announcements keep rolling in the over the next few days.

Even with all the positive vibes in the convention hall our readers are looking for a bit more…we are really looking for new, cutting-edge hardware! This year’s BlizzCon has exploded with hardware vendors trying to get the attention of gamers. We stopped by their booths to find out what hardware goodies they had for the people.

Our first stop was ASUS’s booth where they were prominently displaying their Republic of Gamers logo.

Here we see how the MARS Limited Edition card even has it’s own serial number!

ASUS had a bunch of rigs on display showing the latest Blizzard titles, but we really liked the customized paint/sticker jobs that promoted their official BlizzCon status.

Here is the ASUS Maximus III Gene, another one of the Maximus series of gaming boards that is due to be released in conjuction with the new Intel Core i5.

Below, is the ASUS Matrix video card. When this card is under load the backlighting color changes on the “Matrix”. The heavier the load, the more the color change. Right now, the card is hardly being pushed, but when the card is doing work, the color gradually goes from white to yellow, to orange, up to red. Very cool for those that have cases that you can see into.

One of the coolest boards we have seen in a very long time, the upcoming flagship for ASUS’s Republic of Gamers, the Maximus III Formula. Designed and built for Intel’s Core i5 processors, this board is loaded with more features than a new supercar. One of the things you will notice when you see this board is that there are no floppy IDE controller ports. You will only find SATA headers on this board. Also, I’m told that there is only one chipset on this motherboard.

This board even has a USB plug so that you can connect your laptop to use to overclock the settings! The color scheme is Hmm, come to think of it, its got the same red trim like the upcoming Blizzard title Diablo III!

Derek Yu, Product Manager for ASUS gave us a brief tour of the upcoming Core i5 motherboard, the ASUS Maximus III Formula