Dedicated Server

[UThomas]

I'm considering buying a used Dell PowerEdge server. It has dual P2 266's, 384 meg ram, and SCSI hard drives and CD Rom. This is for $300. Will this be powerful enough to run as a dedicated server on Win2k for games like Half Life, Quake 3, and soon Giants? Or will it only be good for a file/mp3 server?

Thanks,

Thomas

 

[bex0rs]

It'll be pretty much useless, better sell it to me 😀

~bex0rs

 

[CollegeGuy]

The HL/CS server program likes fast processors . . .

 

[UThomas]

Well everything and everybody like fast processors 🙂 The question is how fast?

Thomas

 

[bex0rs]

Well, most people would say that game servers like RAM. But speaking from experience, I've run a dedicated 8-person 1 map only Quake 3 server under FreeBSD and had it full with no lag for any of the clients. The hardware specs on the server... a Winchip 200 w/ 24 MB of ram. Of course, there will be a bit more overhead under Win2k, but I'd say that the Dell will definitely be able to handle dedicated servers for each of those games with room to spare.

~bex0rs

 

[bex0rs]

... and if HL/CS starts using up too much resources, just close it! 😀

 

[Workin']

I think that sounds like way more than $300 worth of fun! Should be plenty good for what you want to do. You could always upgrade the CPUs to something faster for not much more $$$ - what's a used P2/450 CPU go for these days?

 

[UThomas]

Thanks for the replies. Yea, it is pretty inexpensive (it was a best offer type thing). Part of that though is that it is not very upgradable. It doesn't use SDram and I think the chipset (440 LX?) only supports 66mhz FSB pentium 2's (I think they only made those up to 300 mhz). I'll put a fat SCSI hard drive on it though. I'd really love to be able to drop in 400 Mhz Xeon's with 1 meg cache for $45 each but oh well...

Thomas