Dual Xeon or single P4 for LAN server?

[chaddyle]

We started a LAN party a little over a year ago with 35 people. It has grown to 100+. The servers that we started with were XP2000's on some inexpensive ECS motherboards with PC133 RAM.
We would like to start working on some new servers, but are sure which way to go. Dual Xeon/ AMD MP or just a couple of single P4/XP's. Also, will we need SCSI or just Serial ATA? Thoughts?

 

[Politik]

several cheap single-proc amd boxes. scsi is definitely unneeded, and sata has no performance benefit right now. I'd guess you'll want about 3-5 2400+ boxes.

 

[Mardeth]

...and a lot of DDR ram (768mb+).

 

[InlineFive]

1. Dedicated servers do not need to load textures, shaders, etc so high speed hard drives are unnecessary. Just buy a good 8MB-buffer IDE drive.
2. In terms of processors it's your personal choice. Some games will let you host more then one dedicated server on one computer, but you will need more power. I would also recommend AMD processors because they have a more powerful FPU coprocessor then P4s. My Athlon XP 1700 can compute 40 bots A.I. in addition to rendering very smoothly on BF1942. I would say dual Athlon MP 1.2GHz, 1GB mem, 3Com Gigabit and Windows XP Pro with all visual styles turned off. Or if you are knowledgable in Linux that would be good choice too since Linux uses less resources the Windows. Depending on what game you are running you might want a couple boxes.
3. I don't know if you have done this (I imagine you have) but do your switchs have server (and possible upload?) ports that are Gigabit, not the more standard 10/100 for all the clients?

Hope this helps!

-Por

 

[Khyron320]

If you run bf1942 at your lan 64 ppl in one of those servers will MAX out a 2ghz P4 so you CANNOT run any other servers running a box like that. Just thought i'd throw that in i would think a couple of different boxes would be good as oposed to a dual cpu box.