rate this basic (budget) Source-based game 24/7 server setup

[Turbonium]

Consider price as well as the hardware. Consider whether it's all going to work for a 12 person server (with bots to fill up the server to 12 if not enough users are playing). Server would be running 24/7:

Intel DH61DL mITX H61
Form factor: small. Not like I'm going to add in any cards or expand it in any way.

Intel Celeron G1610 2.6GHz (Ivy Bridge - 2MB)
Is this adequate?

2x4GB RAM
Enough?

WD RE4 500GB 7200rpm HDD
Perhaps overkill, but I want it to be rock-solid reliable and to potentially last for many years of use.

mITX case with 250W PSU
The power supply is included with the case, so it's probably not the greatest in quality.

I can get all this hardware for around $330 (before taxes) + shipping, before shopping around for better deals of course. Thoughts?

 

[Sleepingforest]

That Ivy Bridge CPU won't work out of the box with that H61 motherboard. I'm also not sure if 8GB RAM is enough for 12 people. Minecraft servers, for example, take roughly 1GB per person, plus some extra. I don't know how well server software for games will work with multiple cores, but you may want to invest in some extra oomph there as well, in terms of extra cores and speed.

What's your budget anyway? You may have to push it to the limit (assuming ~$500) to get a "good" server for twelve:
PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant / Benchmarks

CPU: AMD FX-8320 3.5GHz 8-Core Processor ($179.99 @ Newegg)
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-970A-DS3 ATX AM3+ Motherboard ($77.55 @ Newegg)
Memory: Corsair 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR3-1600 Memory ($69.99 @ Amazon)
Storage: Western Digital Red 1TB 3.5" 5400RPM Internal Hard Drive ($85.98 @ SuperBiiz)
Case: Cooler Master Elite 430 ATX Mid Tower Case ($29.99 @ Newegg)
Power Supply: Corsair Builder 430W 80 PLUS Bronze Certified ATX12V Power Supply ($34.99 @ Newegg)
Total: $465.49 after 3 $10 rebates
(Generated by PCPartPicker 2013-02-26 18:58 EST-0500)

 

[Turbonium]

That Ivy Bridge CPU won't work out of the box with that H61 motherboard. I'm also not sure if 8GB RAM is enough for 12 people. Minecraft servers, for example, take roughly 1GB per person, plus some extra. I don't know how well server software for games will work with multiple cores, but you may want to invest in some extra oomph there as well.

What's your budget anyway? You may have to push it to the limit (assuming ~$500) to get a "good" server for twelve.*

Tbh I might make it a 8 person/slot server, given my limited bandwidth (0.60 megabits upload, give or take; that equates to about 76-77 kB/s, so around 9+ kB/s a player, not counting any overhead).

Also, according to this, the board should work fine. Are you sure it won't work? It could be a mistake.

 

[Sleepingforest]

Tbh I might make it a 8 person/slot server, given my limited bandwidth (0.60 megabits upload, give or take; that equates to about 76-77 kB/s, so around 9+ kB/s a player, not counting any overhead).

Also, according to this, the board should work fine. Are you sure it won't work? It could be a mistake.

The board physically fits with the CPU, but you'll need a Sandy Bridge chip to power it on and update the BIOS to get the Ivy Bridge chip to function.

 

[Turbonium]

The board physically fits with the CPU, but you'll need a Sandy Bridge chip to power it on and update the BIOS to get the Ivy Bridge chip to function.

Wow, even with newer board revisions? That's incredibly lame.

 

[Sleepingforest]

I don't think any board revisions of the DH61DL make it to Ivy Bridge, but Intel is claiming otherwise. I'll need to ask some more experienced person to make sure.

EDIT: It says that you need a minimum BIOS version of 0042, which it probably DOES NOT ship with by default. The base BIOS revision number is 0016.

 

[mfenn]

Wow, even with newer board revisions? That's incredibly lame.

It all depends on how long the board has been sitting in the channel. A board with a newer BIOS revision from the factory should work, but you don' really have any way of knowing that beforehand. All but the 5-6 most popular boards can sit on the shelf for months.

As for the rest, Source based servers are not terribly intensive, you can do it with that hardware no problem (given the motherboard caveat).

The other big issue I see with the machine is the hard drive. Expensive HDDs are NOT significantly more reliable than cheap ones. RAID is the way you get reliability with HDDs. A couple of these 2.5" Hitachi's in RAID1 will beat the WD in reliability any day of the week.

 

[Turbonium]

It all depends on how long the board has been sitting in the channel. A board with a newer BIOS revision from the factory should work, but you don' really have any way of knowing that beforehand. All but the 5-6 most popular boards can sit on the shelf for months.

As for the rest, Source based servers are not terribly intensive, you can do it with that hardware no problem (given the motherboard caveat).

Do you think I can get the vendor to check the motherboard revision for me (without opening the box - i.e. from the barcode of the box or whatnot)? That would be incredibly awesome of them. I guess it would depend on the vendor, though.

 

[mfenn]

Unfortunately the PCB revision doesn't really tell you all that much. They'd need to be able to boot the board to check the BIOS version. I'm not going to say that there is no vendor out there that would do such a thing, but I don't think you'll find many.

 

[Turbonium]

Only because I don't trust Intel's website 100% (I only trust it 99%), does that board I listed above support RAID-1 natively? The website says it doesn't btw.

 

[Turbonium]

In regards to IB support: how about boards based on the Q77 Express chipset? Intel says it supports IB:

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/chipsets/business-chipsets/q77-express-chipset.html

 

[Sleepingforest]

B75, H77, Z75, Z77, and Q77 should support Ivy Bridge out of the box. However, only the former 4 can be found commonly on sites like Newegg.

 

[Turbonium]

I might just get a Sandy Bridge generation Celeron instead (G540). That way, I pay slightly less for the CPU itself, and considerably less for the motherboard (I found a Q77 Express chipset mITX motherboard, but it's almost double the cost of the DH61DL).

It's not like the the IB Celeron is that much faster, so whatever (both have 2MB cache, so it just comes down to IPC). I might as well go all out budget. Tell me if there's a flaw in this argument.

EDIT: I just realized there is no native RAID support with the DH61DL. Argh. I might just ditch the idea of RAID in favour of saving money (1 less HDD to get, and half the cost on the mobo).

 

[_Rick_]

I would seriously consider renting a dedicated server from someone, instead of dumping that kind of money on a local machine.
A VM might be a bit too "small", but a low to mid-end machine with a proper connection will probably make things much more enjoyable.
To get some money back on the rent, you could even rent out some unused web-space on it.
500$ should get you about a year of usage on a lower-tier dedicated machine.

 

[mfenn]

I might just get a Sandy Bridge generation Celeron instead (G540). That way, I pay slightly less for the CPU itself, and considerably less for the motherboard (I found a Q77 Express chipset mITX motherboard, but it's almost double the cost of the DH61DL).

It's not like the the IB Celeron is that much faster, so whatever (both have 2MB cache, so it just comes down to IPC). I might as well go all out budget. Tell me if there's a flaw in this argument.

EDIT: I just realized there is no native RAID support with the DH61DL. Argh. I might just ditch the idea of RAID in favour of saving money (1 less HDD to get, and half the cost on the mobo).

Even without RAID you could still use two HDDs. Just use a program like Macrium Reflect to clone to the other HDD on a schedule. Then if anything fails, just switch the system to boot from the other HDD.

I agree that getting a Sandy Bridge CPU is totally fine in this instance and is guaranteed to work with any revision of the board.