Will Smith Wins CES PC Building Race!

Posted 01/11/2008 at 2:05pm | by David Murphy

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Will Smith made his mark as the King of Vegas, if not the entire realm of geek-dom, by extending his right hand and nerd-smacking 29 other competitors at this year's Build Your Own PC Race. With a total building time of 10:31, Will just barely squeaked ahead of Stephen Fung (11:10) and last year's big winner, Charlie Demerjian (11:46). It's Will's first win at TigerDirect's big race, and possibly his last -- it's unclear whether the champ plans to retire at the pinnacle of his PC speed-building career, or whether he's going to pull a Rocky and squeak out a few additional, painful performances.

I only mention "painful," as Will did indeed sacrifice a bit of himself in his quest to win $10,000 for his charity of choice, Penny Arcade's Child's Play. Ever the clumsy, Will managed to gash his thumb within the first ten seconds of the contest's start, opening a nasty wound while attempting to install his rig's floppy drive. That didn't stop Will from bleeding all the way to victory. I'm pretty sure he was still gushing life juice even after his machine had booted up. But let nobody say that Will Smith didn't give it all for his computer.

As mentioned, Child's Play will now receive $10K courtesy of Will Smith and Tiger Direct--the race's sponsor. Some lucky tyke will also receive the very computer Will built -- ideally cleaned, I would hope. Or maybe they just better make one at the ol' factory somewhere and send that instead. According to Will, his bodily fluids were, "all over the place." Yikes.

Other editors that were crushed by Maximum PC's fearless editor-in-chief included representatives from the Wall Street Journal, CNET, Revision3, Wired, PC World, Gizmodo, and Computer Shopper. However, this was allegedly the longest it's ever taken a competitor to assemble said AMD-based PC. So even in victory, Will shares a mild bit of defeat. He claims the competition was just tougher this year -- but if we've learned anything from Revenge of the Sith, it's that some young upstart is undoubtedly eyeing Will's triumph with a seething jealousy. Can't wait to see what happens next year! Pictures of Will's shining moment below:

See that hand? That's not paint...

Champion Will celebrates his first-place win. Although the monitor says second place -- one competitor actually ended up beating Will time-wise, but was assessed a 60-second penalty for failing to plug in the power to his optical drive.

You'll note in the background that some of the competitors didn't even finish building said computers by the time of the check presentation. Perhaps we should send them subscriptions to Maximum PC.