Let battle commence

The first thing you notice as you walk through the door to the i30 LAN party at Newbury Racecourse is the heat. Each of the top-end gamers' PCs set out in ranks across the room is chugging through a couple of hundred Watts of power. In all, 1,500A of current is being delivered to the venue's three floors, where the desks groan with high-end hardware. Each PC is stuffed with fan-cooled graphics cards and energy-sapping AMD Intel processors. Half of them have their cases off, exposing the electronic guts in a bid to get a little more cooling. Put lots of these machines together and it means installing extra industrial fans in the venue just to keep everything cool. Fifteen hundred people have gathered with the biggest, baddest PCs, graphics cards and supersized monitors they can find, to blast at each other with an array of virtual weaponry that would leave a real marine sprawling in the mud.