This year's event is shaping up to be extremely fun with more focus on real world job skills but at the same time leaving room for different strategies to see if you can top other schools and not only that - we can even compare the students team scores to real world Avnet Integration technician scores so it should be a really fun day.

Here are some of the latest questions from students:

#1) What type of machine screws will be used for the various parts and chassis? slotted, phillips, or other?

We have made a change in the tuning event - allowing the case of the PC to be opened. The current Game event form states that the cases would be closed and no entry allowed- this restriction will now be removed and teams can enter the inside of the system. The Game event form will be updated soon with this change.

Hi, Mark again!

This is the second year for this game and I am proud to say that last year this game was a smashing success. It is a little different than many of the other games because it doesn't require any preparation, other than knowing basic networking principles and it is a "beat the clock" type of game where contestants need to weigh correctness vs. speed vs. neatness -- and all of the above count!

Hi, my name is Mark Wysolmierski. I am a Senior Systems Administrator for Avnet on the Wintel Services team in Global Information Solutions. We have a great team at Avnet and I have been with the company now for almost 10 years!! I am 43 years old. I am married (my wife Jill works for Avnet too) and I have two daughters ages 13 and 10. We moved to Arizona in 1998 from the NY/NJ area (GO GIANTS!)

Go check out the AMD Fastest Game page to see the updated Game Form that now has the Final H/W list - New Motherboard, graphics and case info has now been added.

The Avnet Tech Games will be featured on the Suns pre-game show this Friday, Feb. 6 between 6:45 and 6:55 p.m. on Fox Sports Arizona. Check it out!

Final version of the video cards have arrived. Thank you to our sponsor Sapphire for supplying us with 8 new ATI HD4870 1Gb graphics cards to be used in the Tune the Fastest event as well as 4 of the new HD3450's to be used in the Build the Fastest event.
We have made some minor updates to the Game Event Form - hope to be posting that very soon along with the sample Build Instructions.
Stay Tuned!

We are expecting to receive our Sapphire video cards this week which is our final hardware item for the systems in the event.

This year's game is shaping up very nicely - all hardware is almost here and testing has begun on baseline benchmarks.

VMWare will reference our game on their site under the "Events" tab which takes our game to a new level.