Fastest Assembly Gets The Prize
By Dustin Goot, The Daily
COMDEX 2003 wouldn't be the first place where one could find techies in a feverish race to erect a machine from a jumble of parts, but it might be the only one to reward them with a $4,000 computer for doing so.
Thanks for this deviant program go to PC Magazine, whose "Fastest Geek" competition pits dexterous hardware jockeys against each other in a timed computer assembly task.
At one Tuesday afternoon "heat," four contestants stood on stage 
with screwdrivers raised, as the guts of a computer lay splayed out in front of them next to an empty case. Their goal: install memory, a video card, and three internal drives; connect a fan and motherboard power; and hook in a mouse and keyboard, and do it faster than three rivals. Around five minutes would do the trick.
The competition started and the four hopefuls - two men and two women - settled into a feverish rhythm of screwing, mounting, and plugging in pins and wires. Meanwhile, three emcees narrated the competition, playfully ribbing the geeks with comments like, "Oh, she's got a calculator watch. You know she must be serious." A crowd of about 300 looked on intently.
The six-minute mark passed with the race still too close to call, although one contestant had taken herself out of the running by engaging the assistance of two tech support personnel. The two male competitors flipped their cases upright around the same time, leaving only the side panel to be screwed on. The tense final moments ticked away. Finally, Zach Devlin, standing on the far right of the stage, threw down his screwdriver and raised his hands triumphantly just seconds before his neighbor finished.
Now the contest lay in the hands of the judges, who had to verify that the components had been installed correctly and the machine could successfully boot Windows. Minor errors such as failing to connect the fan cost 15 seconds; more egregious mistakes like missing a screw added 30.
The results of the heat were momentarily cast into doubt when the judges identified an incorrectly positioned drive in Devlin's computer - a 15-second infraction. However, his closest competitor continued to look glum, and judges quickly found multiple errors with the young man's work. Devlin was pronounced the winner with a penalty-adjusted time of six minutes and 54 seconds.
Devlin, an IT administrator at engineering firm MGD Technologies, attributed his victory to "putting everything into the case [first], then screwing it all in at once." He described his skills as "pretty much self-taught."
With the victory Devlin earned the right to compete in Tuesday's final later that afternoon. The winner of this contest is then eligible for the grand final happening today, along with Monday's winner and two earlier champions from "Fastest Geek" events held in Boston and San Francisco. The latter two contestants were flown to Las Vegas, courtesy of PC Magazine.
The four geeks will square off for the grand prize - a $4,000 ABS PC powered by AMD's new Athlon 64 FX-51 processor. ("It's a real geeky system," PC Magazine labs director Nick Stam said.)
The early Las Vegas line has Monday's final winner, 21-year-old Jeremy Bergen, as favorite based on a blazing time of five minutes, 18 seconds. He beat his closest rival in that race by more than 40 seconds, not counting penalties. And while he attributed his victory to "just luck," Bergen admitted that he "was born around computers." He is attending the show with his father, who is also his boss at a payroll systems consultancy.
Thus far, no other competitor has broken the six-minute barrier. The final will take place at noon today at the PC Magazine booth (#9766).
Dustin Goot is an associate editor of The Preview Drop him a line at dustin.goot@medialiveintl.com
