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Inside a ballroom at the Wynn resort in Las Vegas, 29 tech journalists (all men) donned khaki work shirts and set out to beat a record time of ten minutes to PC together. At stake as money for charity ($10,000 donated from TigerDirect CompUSA plus the assembled machine for the first place winner's charity of choice), and, of course, geek cred.

The PC components lay on tables, ready for assembly: an AMD Phenom II X4 Quad Core processor, an ATI Radion HD4800 GPU, and AMD 7-series chipsets. Cheerleaders did an acrobatic routine and summoned each contestant across the stage. Each contestant studied a rulebook with precise instructions for PC assembly. Contestants had to use specific slots for certain components, and add parts in a precise order, or be disqualified.

Tom's Hardware Managing Editor Chris Angelini gamely took his spot as contestant number 4. As the race began, he quickly opened his case and begin building. Early on, he seemed to be ahead of the pack, but then things started to go wrong. "The case locks snapped off in my hand," he said later. "The quality of the case isn't very high, either." But hey, its for charity.

Within five minutes and fifty-nine seconds, the contest emcee had declared a tentative winner--Al Hernandez of Fox Morning News. By this time, Angelini knew something was wrong with his machine. It simply would not start up. The error message on his monitor implied some kind of hardware failure. When a contest representative finally came by to check on Angelini's machine, at least ten other contestants had booted up their machines, and managed to ping the contest server (a contestant's proof of success).

Contest staff evaluted Angelini's hardware and concluded a failure had occurred. "He said, well 'sometimes that just happens,'" said Angelini. "I didn't want to say this, but perhaps if it had been a Core i7 processor, well, maybe it wouldn't have happened." Unfortunately, it happened to several other contestants as well. Here's another error message.

Ultimately, each contestant's chosen charity will receive a re-assembled version of the contest PC, so no participant comes away empty-handed. But perhaps a little more quality assurance is in order for next year's competition. Said one CES PC building contest veteran, "I've done this many years, and this is the third time I've gotten a lemon."

Of course, there are no hard feelings. If contestants were disappointed with the outcome of the contest, they could've simply amused themselves by checking out a giant AMD ice sculpture, or gotten AMD fake-tattooed to their skin by an artist hired for the competition reception.