Inside the World's Largest LAN Party

MrSeb writes "Last weekend, over 12,000 LAN party goers turned up at DreamHack Winter 2011 in Jonkoping, Sweden with a PC under the arm, on their back, or packed carefully in the trunk of their car. Every single attendee is squeezed into just three massive halls — the largest holding 5,000 computers — or four days, only taking brief breaks to sleep or check out one of the many stages (including some of the largest e-sport tournaments of the year). Being the largest LAN party in the world, DreamHack's infrastructure is suitably monumental: it takes days to lay the thousands of cables, and at the heart of the network is tower of Cisco routers that interface with a 120Gbps internet connection provided by Telia."

Comments

Re:Power and Heat?

[Hadlock]

I know that quakecon (about 3000 pcs + displays) brings in multiple generators on semi trucks. All the computers are run from diesel generators that are brought in from offsite, and the only grid power being used is for the air conditioning and the lighting of the building. The odd thing is that a modern 24" display draws about 1.5 amps, roughly what your computer draws. Even a "phat gaming rig" with dual video cards only pulls about 550 watts/1.2 amps while running the water cooler pump and spinning forty 30mm multi-color LED fans. Most 1000w power supplies are only running at 50% capacity, which means they are only working about about 60-70% efficiency, where a properly sized 600w power supply would be running at 80-90% efficiency.