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According to Lau, thousands of gamers helped last year's ACON4 event become a major success. 'This year's event will have more locations and bigger prizes, as well as the addition of a new game into the contest,' according to Lau.

The gamers will first compete in regional ACON5 qualifiers. During each qualifying event, the winners will win the right to represent their region at the ACON5 Finals. From there, the winners will be flown, all expenses paid, to the ACON5 finals. Last year, Warcraft III: Frozen Throne was chosen to be the official game. This year, ACON5 organizers have added one of the world's number one online games, Counter-Strike, to the roster. This year, Abit was able to garner Valve and Blizzard's official support for the ACON5 event, Lau said.

The first qualifiers to kick off in the UK on March 9 will take place in 80 IGUK gaming centres in around the UK. The qualifiers to follow in China will take place in 40 cities at 400 Internet cafes, said Lau. There aren't any set locations for the US, but the final US qualifier will be held at E3 in May this year, said Lau.

'Due to the many fixes and fine tuning happening on Counter-Strike using the Half-Life 2 engine, we have already decided to use Counter-Strike based on the Half-Life 1 game engine for the qualifiers, and we should know by mid-April which version of Counter-Strike will be used in the final tournaments', Lau explained.

'Corsair is very happy that Kingston decided to not be an official worldwide sponsor of ACON5. Corsair is very eager to make inroads to Asia and especially China. Currently, Corsair has no sales representatives in China, and ACON5 will help the company to raise its profile considerably,' according to former Abit marketing manager, and current Asia sales director for Corsair, Scott Thirlwell.

The ACON4 finals in 2004 were the culmination of many different gaming competitions held at locally sponsored LAN parties all around the world, from Canada and the USA all the way to Russia and China. Abit in conjunction with co-sponsors Intel, Kingston, ViewSonic and ATI Technologies, hosted the ACON4 semi-final events to determine who would go to the finals in Shanghai.