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Owner of LAN Gaming Cafe, Need Help..

X

Xolture

Junior Member
**Since I'm a new member, please forgive if I posted this in the wrong section**

hello everyone,

I'm going to open a LAN Gaming Cafe and i'm going to need your help and advice to get adequate PC specifications for my LAN Gaming Cafe.

First of All, here are some brief info;;

Most people here in my area play:

Offline/LAN games:
-Counter-Strike: Condition Zero
-Counter-Strike 1.6
-Unreal Tournament 2004
-Need for speed Underground 2

Online Games:
-Gunbound ( http://www.gunbound.net )
-Ragnarok Online ( http://www.ragnarokonline.com )
-Tantra Online ( a new rich featured 3D Online MMORPG Game, http://www.tantra-online.com/eng/ )

Right now my LAN Gaming Cafe missions are:

-Provide a comfortable place (Air Conditioner, Leather Seat, etc)
-Cheap cost to play and surf
-Provide adequate entertainment in the PCs (Many Games, Music, Movies, scanned comics, etc)
-Provide adequate office applications (For people who come in to do their work)
-To defeat other Internet and Gaming Cafes in entertainment features and to take there loyal costumers to mine.

and last important one..

-To bring Counter Strike: Source as full featured eye candy LAN-Gaming
(The game must run smooth in highest detail) Why? since all the people here is craze with cs.

There are some gaming cafes in my area that already installed CS:Source to
their system, however people don't play them since it
run bad (Slow & pixelated) on there pc systems (Most cafes only got low spec PCs such as athlon 2000+ combined with geforce 4mx/geforce fx5200) and they play the older condition zero and 1.6 instead.


Anyway, after All the confusion for weeks, i decided to get this PC specification for my LAN Gaming Cafe:

-Monitor: Samsung Syncmaster 793mb ($120) (Popular monitor in asia PC Market, if there's any better for value then let me know.)
( Pictures & Info: http://shopper.cnet.com/Samsun...175_9-31097065.html?q= )

-Motherboard: DFI NF II Ultra AL ($60) (1 year old Mobo, however its a good nforce2 ultra mobo, and cheap too, 1/2 price of the LANParty version)
( Pictures & Info: http://www.new-generation.nl/i..._1645.html&lang=nl )

-CPU: AMD Athlon XP 3000+ ($80) (Decided to get this because i think its's the best price/perfomance cost compared to its higher XP 3200+ model. and I say no to overclocking lower models.)

-RAM: Corsair/Kingston DDR PC3200 512MB Value ($70) (If there's anything better for value then let me know.)

-HDD: Western Digital 80GB SATA 8MB Cache 7200 RPM WD800JD ($60) (My best hard drive experiences were with the WDs)

-VGA: Geforce 6600 AGP ($120) (In my opinion, this is the best Value Card at the moment)

-Casing: Simbada 380W Black / Red ($20) (Cool looking case system, similiar to those much more expensive Xaser cases)
( Picture: http://www.rakitan.com/simbadda.jpg )

-K&M: Thermal Take Xaser Termaltake Xaser Desktop Optical Black / Red ($20) (Nice, smooth looking Keyboard and Mouse that will match perfectly with the simbadda case)
( Pictures & Info http://www.pccasegear.com/prod1032.htm )

-Headset: LABTEC Axis 002 (sleek, goodlooking headset)
( Pictures & Info http://www.gamingin3d.com/reviews/axis/main.shtml )

But after all of that, i still have confusions:

1.for the CPU & MOBO, Is it Worth to upgrade to Athlon 64 2800+ combined with DFI LANParty nforce3 250mb board? with $100 more. Will all the games and the application on the workstations will run faster compared to the Athlon XP 3000+? (If it's only gonna give small difference in system speed, and only like 4fps in cs source then i rather spend the extra money for a Geforce 6600GT.

2.I'm scared that Geforce 6600 AGP is not going to run CS: Source smoothly at highest graphic setting (with 4xAA and 16x FSAA), should i get Geforce 6600GT instead? ($80 more).

3.But come back to the point, do people like it to play CS: Source with AA and FSAA? or most people just gonna turn them off? if its true then theres no point in getting the Geforce 6600GT.

4.Should I get a single 512MB RAM or should i get 2x 256mb for the DDR Slots (extra $10).

5.Do you guys think the Thermaltake Xaser Keyboard & Mouse will do its job well? and about getting a high-end mouse model (above $30) i say no, because most people here bring there own mouse anyway to play CS. If the Thermaltake Xaser is good enough, then will it get any better if i get the wireless version ($20 more), such as in look, style and eye candy to customers. but I'm worried about problems with changing batteries and hardware response time, as many people say wireless K&M for gaming is a bad idea.
( Picture & Info: http://www.xoxide.com/a2209.html )

6.Is the Headset good enough? is there any better value ones?

7.If i get the DFI NF II Ultra AL, it won't have soundstorm.. then will the realtek soundcard will be adequate enough? or i should add a cheap SBlive 5.1 to go with?


And, as for network, since i've never had experience with making such big LAN network. then i need to ask few questions:

1.What do you think is best specification for building a server PC. the networked stations is going to be 30+ PCs.
2.Which one is better to install, Switch or a router. if it's router, can you beriefly explain how its going to be installed.


ok that's all... and my decision will greatly affected by your opinions..
thank you very much for helping with me out... if there's any error with my post please correct me. any questions just ask me.
Once again, Thank you very much.


 
Honestly, I'd just watch for a nice DELL Deal over in the Hot Deals forum and buy a few of them. If needed you can have family members order them and such. You can get everything pretty nicely from Dell for relatively inexpensive. You might just need to upgrade the video card if you'd need to. And especially if your company takes off and the computesr are used (and abused) a lot, get the 3 year all encompassing Dell warranty and they cover EVERYTHING.

For the server/network part, I'd head over to the Networking forum and just post that you need to setup a network/server for a LAN Cafe type place. I'm sure people here have done that before and can give you good info.
 
honestly, the dell route sounds best.

switches and routers don't do the same thing. you'll need to have both. well, one router, and probably 2 16 port switches.

leather seats are a good idea, they clean easily.
 
thanks for replying,

sorry, but Dell computer is not available here in Indonesia and i prefer to build my own setup rather than having a branded built.

All PC shops here give a minimum of 1 year+ (depend on manufacturer & wholesaler) for all the hardware they sell. So i wouldn't worry about the warranty. As you may know, in here the warranty from most Branded builts such as HP, are even worse. say for example you take the harddrive out of the case and that's gonna break the warranty.
 
you will want at least 1GB of ram. 512mbx2 if you wanna run CS:S without any sutter or jumps
 
Now, speaking from personal preference, I would much rather use a Socket 939 system with a 3000+. That is probably the best performance for value, and will offer headroom for future upgrading. However, if budget is really a big concern, stick with a socket 754. The Athlon XP's don't seem to run CS:S as well as Athlon64's do.

My brother has an Athlon XP 2800+, 2x256 MB's of DDR-333 RAM, and a 6600 GT. Now, he isn't able to run CS:S at the same visual settings as I am and hold on to decent framerate. My system is a MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum with a 3200+ Winchester, 2x512 MB's of DDR-400 RAM, and a FX5900. Comparing the two systems side-by-side, you can see that mine performs better in almost all the games, including CS:S.
 
You are smart asking all of these questions to the folks here. This is the target audience for the customers you would hopefully draw into your establishment.

As for the systems I think you are building behind the curve to start. It almost looks like you are trying to stay on the cheap or budget side. I mean this as no offense but If this is going to be a business... one thing comes to my mind. What is better about gaming at your establishment than sitting at home and gaming? If I myself were to choose to hang at your place something would need to draw me there away from my own setup. What do you have that most 12 year olds now adays don't have or can't get.

Since you chose to build your own try to future proof your systems as MUCH as possible. I would suggest as ggjb did to go 939 pin and something 3000+ or better. Don't bother with overclocking or anything like that! You don't want to run around troubleshooting a bunch of enthusiast systems. Make them STABLE! OC'ing is fine for your own system but I really wouldn't suggest wanting to support it in a business environment. If you do OC do it very marginally.

The ULTIMATE question you need to ask yourself is: What is going to be better about playing on MY systems. Almost EVERYONE has capable gaming systems now + DSL or Cable, or at least a couple friends that play games and PC gaming is becoming more affordable.

I'm not knocking your plan "one bit" as I myself looked into starting one of these establishments but after seeing a lot of them fold I shyed away.

Be careful finding yourself having to upgrade in a year to allow people to play the greatest hot games. I would get LESS systems quantity and make them higher QUALITY.

Also you will need to plan some serious thought into locking down the front end to not allow users to the operating system. Probably putting them on an Active Directory domain and locking them down with policies and using a front end menu system hiding the OS would help a lot.

Good Luck on your venture.

 
definitely get the 2x512MB RAM, also try the powercolor ati radeon 9800, its only $167 and has 256MB DDR RAM, check the 3D api requirements on your games though, if theyre openGL, this card only supports 2.0 (DX 9 though)
 
There was a very nice LAN gaming center in my city for a few months. Even with great rates, saturday night parties, and powerful machines, they still couldn't make it profitable. Most of the week it just sat almost empty (sometimes one or two people in on an afternoon for coffee and to surf the web) and when it was busy there just wasn't enough money to be made to pay the bills.
 
The Asian community is much different than one in the US. There are tons of profitable internet cafe's there in places like Hong Kong, Indonesia, China (a lot of them illegal but profitable), Japan and that's not counting Korea where the whole country is internet crazy. There are places you can go to have a beer and surf the web believe it or not.

I agree with a couple of other guys here. The systems you seem to be building seem to be behind the curve. I'd actually go with Socket 939 based A64's. They're going to be highly upgradeable but you probably won't be upgrading the processor much but rather the video cards as that will probably provide the most bang for the buck.

The new MSI "RS480M2-IL" ATI Radeon XPRESS 200 Chipset Motherboard looks like a good cheap choice. It's under 100 bucks (about 90 from Newegg) and it has onboard video. Now, the onboard video is going to suck performance wise for games but I'm sure you'll have a small section that's set aside not for games but for business/school use. Students needing a little more room on their desk for books while doing a report or business folk typing up a report and have their work on their desk. You can save a bit of money by not having to get video cards for all of them and these boards are cheaper than the nVidia NF4 based ones.

The only precaution is that these boards just came out and there are zero reviews for them as of the time I posted this reply. Maybe wait a bit to see reviews on it in case it's a dog if you decide you might want to buy these. Look here http://www.amdboard.com/ati_radeon_xpress_200.html for some links to some reviews of the chipset. That's reviews for the chipset and not this particular board.

Using a S939 motherboard will mean you should buy an A64 3000+. The Winchester core based one that's 90nm. The good thing is this processor is way better than the normal Athlons you were thinking of getting and shouldn't need to be upgraded for at least two years as far as gaming goes.

The other reason to have an A64 board is PCI-X. It's almost guaranteed that the majority of video cards two years down the line are going to be PCI-X based (this also happens to be roughly the same time you might want to upgrade that as well). I can almost guarantee that the price performance ratio at that time will be in PCI-X's favor rather than the current state where AGP is the best performance/price ratio. Not to a large degree granted but it's slightly in favor of AGP now and will slightly be in favor of PCI-X in the future.

I would definitely not get 2x256MB RAM. I'd get 1x512MB if you're on a budge and upgrade with another 512MB of RAM later on making it a 1GB RAM system 2x512MB. If you're not on that limited of a budge, go 2x512MB of RAM and that's all you should need for the next two years as far as RAM goes.

Don't forget to put in a good PSU. You don't need $100 PSU's but do get something aside from the generic crap that comes with most computer cases.
 
Since you will probably replace the CPU and motherboard instead of upgrade it, you might buy a cheap socket 754 motherboard and Athlon 64 2800+ - 3000+ (Chaintech makes a good nforce motherboard). Here in the US a good 754 motherboard is $25-50 cheaper than socket 939.
 
Eh, he IS going to be running CS:S if his computers are able to handle it smoothly. Read what his first post says. The reason CS:S is not as popular as the older CS is cause a lot of the net cafe's there are running it on older hardware where it chokes with horrible laggy framerates.
 
Hi.... My experience of internet cafes in Jakarta is some pretty low specs... How much would you be charging per hour? It's normally only about 3000rp, so it's difficult to get nice PCs. I guess you will want to keep these machines a long time and not upgrade too much.

I think any machine with a 6600 GPU will be *much* better than the competition in Jakarta, and I guess it should run CS source pretty well. You will probably get some failures due to those low-quality power supplies, the chance is 100% as you have so many machines. Let's hope it doesn't damage any expensive parts when it goes (especially with the quality of Indonesian electricity!).

On the RAM, cheapest RAM should be fine. But you only need PC2700 RAM to go with that 166MHz fsb chip. PC3200 will run at PC2700 speeds, on that CPU (XP 3000+). Only with overclocking or a XP 3200+ would you have any reason to get PC3200 RAM.

I had a look at http://www.thetechlounge.com/review.php?directory=leadtek_6600gt_pcie&page=7, and it seems like the 6600 GT will do 47fps at 1280x1024 with max detail. I wouldn't skimp on the graphics card... My guess would be that in that system spending $100 extra on A64 + mboard will not improve performance at all, as you said you didn't want to overclock, whereas 6600GT over 6600 will make a big and noticeable difference.

Here's the best place to compare - check any of the benchmarks here (and at the other pages there):

http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20041222/vga_charts-09.html

Half-Life 2 is basically the same as Counterstirke Source so you can see there the 6600 GT is about 65% faster than the regular 6600 (consistently, on a range of apps). So $80 extra for more performance is pretty good, and will give you greater longevity. The 6600 is probably not quite fast enough
49fps at 1024x768 with 4xAA & 8xAF
but 'testing system consisted of an ASUS A8N-SLI based on NVIDIA's nForce4-SLI chipset, an AMD Athlon64 4000+ and 1GB of RAM.'

Since you can't afford that you won't get 49fps, you will get less (maybe 30fps). And considering that you have a 1280 x1204 monitor, you will definitely want that GT power - 83fps at max detail, AA, AF and 1024x768 should still be quick even on Athlon XP 3000+.

Don't forget that new games will be more demanding on graphics cards every year, and you will still be making your money back in 3 years time, so it makes sense to buy a good one.

On the mouse, I would just buy Microsoft mouse and keyboard, forget about any fancy models. And buy some spares for when they break. Optical mice are good in an environment like this, but response time is an issue, so might not be suitable for you (although I find that normal ball mice quickly lose performance when they are used and get dirty).

Hard disk looks like a good choice, everything will be cracked and installed on the hard drive, so you want a decent size, and 80gb should be enough.

 
just reading some of the other replies here... For the benefit of the American readers who haven't been to Indonesia, most internet cafes charge $0.33/hour, some slightly less. So you need to remember that. THe other thing is that these places are pretty pumping, full of people, heavy use. Most places have got old machines like Pentium 3 or early Pentium 4s, some with broken monitors (colour issues), etc.

Indonesia doesn't run on US-style margins, the staffing is much less significant (e.g., in the West you spec out everything nicely, because it's less than a day's wages, in Indonesia staff is cheap, hardware is the same price). In Indonesia the guys working in there will make maybe $80/month (for skilled guys), maybe only $40/month for non-computer literate. It's nickels and dimes here and there... And the competition will suck! You won't find many places with socket 939 systems, that's just overkill. Socket 754 maybe I can be sold on if you can prove a performance increase commensurate with price. But when you make maybe a few cents on a customer sitting in the cafe for an hour, the initial purchase cost is VERY significant.

So the initial spec is *not* behind the curve. I would suggest changes to it should *only* be on the basis of increasing the bang/buck ratio, and remembering that the internet cafes nearby are old and slow machines.
 
$30 Raidmax ATX-268WB
$85 Seasonic Super Tornado 400w
$200 Chaintech SE6600G
$110 Chaintech VNF4/Ultra
$135 Corsair VS1GBKIT400
$160 AMD ADA3000BIBOX
$150 Seagate ST3250823AS
$65 NEC ND-3520A BK
$10 NEC FD1231H-302
$130 NEC AS750F-BK
$20 Logitech 967457-0403
 
sorry, I made a mistake. Some XP 3000+ are 166MHZ fsb (PC2700 RAM needed), others are 200MHz fsb. Obviously if you have a 200MHz fbs, get PC3200 RAM.
 
I tried to open a LAN Center called "TopGunSimz" locally a few years back and I will share my experiences with you. We already had the location with 4 medium sized offices and a DSL network connection. The problem we ran into was one of performance vs pricing. We did not have the start up capital needed to build top-end gaming machines, yet we were billing ourselves as immersive gaming.

We had actually spent lots of money to build individual cockpit simulators complete with surround system and a 10" downfire woofer under each seat. When you strapped into one of our machines, you strapped in with a seat harness like in a plane. When you got shot, the impact from the sub shook the flight seat and you felt the impact. You had flight control sticks, rudders, and throttle system. We had additional programmable buttons and intercom systems between the different simulators. It was set up to allow "Squadrons" to come in and set up in two seperate rooms and fly against each other.

The problem we ran into was the machines we ended up sticking into our boxes were notoriously underpowered. We did not have the cash needed to invest in decent hardware and no matter the frills and cockpit sims, customers did not want to play on a slow machine. If I had it to do over again, I would run 4 power machines and fill out the rest with slower versions. Then charge a premium for the power machines to cover the additional cost.

I have to agree with a host of other people here and suggest going a tad bit higher end on the hardware. A64 systems and at least a 6600gt for video. Also go for at least a gig in each machine. Maybe an additional $200 total for each machine, but you will not be stuck with non-functioning machines once the newest games come out. As for cordless keyboards and mice, save your money! Cordless anything tends to walk out the door.
 
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