TechSpot Weekly: 'Friday night fragfest' and giveaway winners

We've held numerous gaming events over the past six months, some of which were promoted publicly (and in turn larger), but many smaller gaming gatherings have also been organized behind the scenes through TechSpot's Steam group. No matter the turnout, we always have a blast playing with you and we'd like to do so on a more consistent basis -- so that's just what we're going to do!

Starting this Friday, we'll host a weekly gaming event open to all TechSpot members. TechSpot's 'Friday Night Fragfest' will start every Friday at midnight eastern, 9 PM pacific. To kick things off, we'll mostly be playing Left 4 Dead 2 and Team Fortress 2, but other popular games will eventually be added to the mix. To participate or to share your thoughts on the event, please post in the official forum thread here.

And now the moment you've all been waiting for. As all good things our "make your vote count" giveaway has come to an end. We are very happy about the results and the participation we received on a daily basis from our members. As it's become tradition, the wide majority of participants did well in following our quality posting guidelines and as such it's been a joy to have more people voicing in our news coverage than ever before.

I can tell you, it's a good thing we make these things random once past the basic rules filter because we had dozens of deserving winners...

Main prize winner
Congratulations taea00! Per his contest sign-up post, he's getting a CPU/Mobo/Ram combo which we will be matching to our PC Buying Guide Enthusiast's PC (Intel Core i5 750, 4GB of G.Skill Ripjaws, and the ASRock P55 Pro motherboard). taea00 was notified a few hours ago and we are waiting to hear back from him, so we can get the barebones combo on his way soon.

Second prize (Nvidia GeForce GTS 450)
Congrats go to madboyv1. Another deserving winner who takes a mid-range GeForce graphics card home. He was notified and announced a few days ago on the original contest thread where he's received plenty of compliments from fellow TS members.

To the rest of participating members... Thank you again! Seriously, we can't thank you enough for your support. Unfortunately, it's the nature of the giveaway and there's not much we can do other than continue giving stuff away. We hope that our next contest will be open by the end of the month. In the meantime, here's the usual battery of entertaining facts behind this last contest.

Some behind the scene stats driving our contest...

• 7500+ news comments were made during the contest period
• Over 800 members signed up for participation, but only 430 actually posted more than a couple of times and thus became eligible
• 16.90 was the average number of posts made by contestants (with more than 3 posts)
• 28% of participants posted more than 20 comments
• 24 members were disqualified from the drawing during the course of the contest
• The main prize poll received 1,839 votes but only a fraction of those actually posted to sign-up. Either that, or someone was trying to game the poll for some reason ;).
• The Apple iPad was the most voted for prize followed closely behind the 27-inch monitor and the CPU/Mobo/Memory combo on third place.

Where to go from here? If you are a PC gamer, make sure you sign up for this Friday's fragfest!