E-sports arena design questions.

[electricalguy]

I'm an electrical engineer with a design firm and we were recently tasked with designing an e-sports arena/practice area for a local university. They're going all in but they're putting the cart before the horse in a few areas. Mainly, they havent specced their equipment yet, so we don't know what to give them in terms of electrical/data infrastructure. We are coming in with an entire new 120/208 service so the sky's the limit. We've been told to future proof it as well, so assume the highest end out of the box stuff. They're doing 18 practice stations and a 6v6 arena so custom builds are likely outside the realm of possibility.
Do gamers perfer hard wired data runs or wireless internet? (fiber is coming in to a nearby data room)
Are there any special pieces of equipment I should account for? LAN hubs or something like that? I'm just spitballing I grew up on halo 1 lan parties.
How many amps will a new gaming PC draw?
How many amps will a new gaming monitor draw?
Could I put two gaming stations on a single 20amp circuit?
If not, would a dedicated 15amp circuit be enough for a single station?

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Unfortunately I can't tell you which university at this point in the project, but it's a legit multimillion dollar project.

 

[Lutfij]

IMHO, the answer to your internet question is to make sure you have the lowest ping at the highest bandwidth. Amp's might not be what you should be looking at rather the wattage of a PC. If you must, you should ask your client what the cut off point for each system's power draw(PSU) will be since you don't want a high amperage breaker on your MDB(main distribution board)/SDB(sub distribution board) that caters to a low powered system.

Also, you should take into account the sort of title the system's will play. Often times e-sports system's that run e-sports titles aren't cream of the crop sort of spec's(yes the highest end spec's make for some grand marketing) but in reality e-sports titles are meant to be easily accessible and in essence will mean that the lower tier system's have access to the games.

So if anything, I'm guestimating that you will need a 450W PSU per system with some mid tier GPU's. If that is the standardized power draw, you can multiply away till their ain't no tomorrow

Also, I'm an architect by education and yes I need to factor in power draw and room requirements to also account for BTU when it comes to cooling a room or space...which also means you should too when you need to factor in the need for the HVAC system.

I've spoken too much, I should let the rest of the community respond as well

Also, welcome to the forums, newcomer! Pleasure to have you among us! Shhhhhhhhh(pun intended)!

 

[electricalguy]

Thank you much. 450W is lower than I expected. Should save our client some decent scratch. I'll be sure to let our mechanical guys know to beef it up. Can't be having sweaty controllers.

 

[Lutfij]

Ah, don't thank me...yet. If anything you just picked at the tip of the iceberg.

You might want to see what each system's specs will be. Ideally list out their specs like so:
CPU:
Motherboard:
Ram:
SSD/HDD:
GPU:
Chassis:
PSU:
Monitor:
Audio equipment: (powered speakers will draw more power than analog driven gaming headphones)

^ that should give you a rough gauge of power draw from the wall.

In retrospect, if you have an efficiently running environment, it saves you and the client off of all the guesswork(and empty wallets later). Desks are what also come to mind. Ergonomics should also play a pivotal role in how long gaming sessions can go on for, not to mention the possibility for sponsors and potentially interested brands to use desks/desk backings as advertising space.

I had a proposal with one of my clients to do custom paint jobs for each player in a team to reflect their attitude/character for a particular game. E.g: If I was to look at a Rainbow 6 Siege team, I'd do a custom paint job of the character that the player plays with in-game. At the very least, maybe just have their colors on the case.

This goes without saying, if your backbone is robust, you can have pretty much anything run off of it but I'm assuming you'd want to have an outlet for each system and that each outlet has it's breaker(you're more of the expert on that field).

 

[electricalguy]

And there-in lies the crux of the matter. They haven't chosen their systems yet, but they want to move forward with design. I'm guessing they're looking for sponsors for the equipment and want to be able to take a design to said sponsors in order to look legit.
So my job is to find a balance between cost/efficiency and the probability of systems requirements. From what I've gleaned the craziest stuff you can get comes out of the box at about 900W and even the monster gaming monitors run sub 100W. If I give myself 15% margin of error I'm at 1150W (9.6 amps at 120v) and I can run 2 top of the line stations on a single 20 amp circuit. Or I could do a dedicated 15A (smallest commonly available breaker) circuit for each station and really have some room to play. Then there is the issue of finite space in your panel and weighting the cost benefit of an additional panel vs the 20A solution... yada yada yada. Although I'm guessing we're looking at multiple panels anyway with 40+ gaming stations an AV room and a broadcast booth (yeah I know).

 

[Lutfij]

Hmmm, then we need to do a little back tracking, what sort of e-sports titles does your client want the system's to run? You could group the system's according to a title if there are more than 2 titles that will be played in your arena.