  The Millennium Gas project aims to undertake smoothed-particle hydrodynamic
resimulations of the Millennium Simulation, providing many hundred massive
galaxy clusters for comparison with X-ray surveys (170 clusters with kTsl > 3
keV). This paper looks at the hot gas and stellar fractions of clusters in
simulations with different physical heating mechanisms. These fail to reproduce
cool-core systems but are successful in matching the hot gas profiles of
non-cool-core clusters. Although there is immense scatter in the observational
data, the simulated clusters broadly match the integrated gas fractions within
r500 . In line with previous work, however, they fare much less well when
compared to the stellar fractions, having a dependence on cluster mass that is
much weaker than is observed. The evolution with redshift of the hot gas
fraction is much larger in the simulation with early preheating than in one
with continual feedback; observations favour the latter model. The strong
dependence of hot gas fraction on cluster physics limits its use as a probe of
cosmological parameters.
