Robert Morris University Illinois and gaming system builder iBuyPower have made history by launching the first varsity-level eSports arena in the United States.

RMU Illinois has gained the prestige of being the first university in the world to feature an on-campus facility for gaming for educational and competitive purposes.

Competitive gaming under the official eSports banner now joins RMU Illinois’ roster of collegiate activities, alongside traditional sports like football and soccer. Like their football team, the university’s eSports team will be known as the Eagles.

But it’s not all about fun and games–RMU is quite serious about its competitive gaming presence.

iBuyPower has officially sponsored RMU’s eSports arena, providing the facility with a slew of powerful hardware to fuel competitive gaming.

The Illinois university offers a full scholarship program focused on eSports, giving gamers the chance at higher learning utilizing their digital prowess.

“We’re thrilled to be launching our eSports scholarship program and putting eSports on the map in higher-education,” said Kurt Melcher, Associate Athletic Director and eSports Coordinator at RMU Illinois.

“With the iBUYPOWER eSports Arena at RMU, we’re changing the way the world thinks about gaming and education.”

The campus arena is full-scale eSports battleground that’s powered by top-of-the-line hardware straight from iBuyPower.

RMU’s Eagles will have the latest and greatest of PC gaming solutions from NVIDIA with GeForce GTX GPUs, and Intel with Core i7 processors and ASUS monitors–all of which ensure the very best in performance.

This landmark moment may kick-off widespread interest in the growing eSports sector and prompt other universities to embrace collegiate-level gaming. It’ll be interesting to see if this trend catches on, and who RMU Illinois’ Eagles will face off against in their first arena competition.

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It isn’t normally a big deal when a system build cooperates with a retailer or an etailer on a new product or a new launch. However, it is a pretty big deal when a system builder allows you to build an entire system using Newegg’s website and configurator to build that system. You can test out the new iBuypower system configurator on Newegg’s website and see how it works for yourself.

The reason why this development is an important one is because iBuypower probably recognizes the value of having Newegg as a partner, and even more importantly Newegg’s customer service. There aren’t many PC builders out there with outstanding customer service or the infrastructure to handle complex customer service needs at a large scale like Newegg can. Really, Newegg has the most experience out of almost everyone and they already have a huge audience, so allowing Newegg users to configure systems on Newegg.com is a great idea.

Even though this is a Newegg-based configurator, they don’t necessarily make all of the parts available on Newegg available to you to build with. That would be the ultimate Newegg-iBuypower configurator if you could basically take any parts from Newegg and slap them in your iBuypower machine. That way, they can check for compatibility and buildability and then let you pay extra for changing your motherboards or PSU.

Once you’ve configured your system on Newegg.com they will configure, build and set up your machine to have it directly shipped to you, as if you had ordered it direct from iBuypower. This brilliance may end up helping iBuypower get an edge over their competitors whom mostly sell pre-built systems to retailers and custom built systems only to people that order direct from them online. I’m not entirely sure how much this will affect Newegg’s or iBuypower’s sales but I do think its a creative way to trying to encourage people to configure and build their systems through a 3rd party.

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