So I'm thinking About Making a Server.....

[dudeman007]

Alright, I'm thinking about possibly making a server. What is necessary to play some of the latest games with about 16-20 max?

Obviously processor and ram are the most important. Mobo I guess doesn't matter so much...but is the video card important? Thanks for your input.

 

[SilentZero]

With any of the latest games a good video card is always important!

 

[InlineFive]

Originally posted by: SilentZero
With any of the latest games a good video card is always important!

Aye, but you forget laddie that dedicated servers don't rely on GPU power. Naw, they like processing power, lots of memory and bandwidth!

Some games are more demanding then others and this can be a pain when hosting over the internet. For a lot of games a server resembling this would be good:

Athlon 64 3000+/Athlon XP 3200+/P4 2.4Ghz
1GB PC3200 Memory
7.2K 8MB HDD
Depending on the game up to around 4Mbits upload internet (BF Vietnam is a hog)

 

[fireontheway]

a fast cpu and lots of memory and a big enough HD that can hold your OS and server files. video card important? nope

 

[fireontheway]

double post :evil:

 

[drag]

Ya if it's just a server don't worry about the card. No game I know of has the server do any actual 3d calculations.

Don't use the server as a gaming box either.

Fast CPU is nice. Dual CPU's is great. It helps with the mutlitasking greatly, not so important much for brute speed.
Plenty of RAM is nice, but excessive amounts gets wasted. It's nice for running mutliple servers out of one box, but if your only going to run one game server, then stick with a single CPU.

You have to monitor that, because if the games have to dip into the harddrive swap for proccessing data your server thruroughput is going to die. RAM is 100,000 times faster then Disk.

The speed of the disk isn't so important as long as you have enough RAM. Once the data gets loaded up in to ram the disk speed doesn't matter. But a nice 8meg 7200 is a defininate plus.

Unfortunately the big $$ is going to spent on the connection. Fast connections with lots of upload speed is going to be 100x more expensive in the long run then your server box (say over a period of a year or 2). A nice SDSL line can be a couple hundred a month.

So think about it this way:

If you have a 1Mb/s SDSL line. (1Mb/s upload and download. limit) That's about T1 speeds.

If you want 20 people on that then that means they each have a max of 51kb between them.

That's about the same amount of bandwidth you get from a very healthy dial up line.

1.1Mb/s SDSL line is the fastest I can get in my area. No adsl.
SpeakyEasy (a nice DSL ISP that is very supportive of sharing bandwidth with neighbors, and customers hosting servers and such) prices the 1.1Mb/s SDSL line at 200 dollars a month. The 768Mb/s line goes for about 159 bucks.

ADSL is often much cheaper. They have a special for a "gamer" ADSL setup. 6Mb/s (!) download, 768Mb/s upload. That's 106 dollars a month after the initial cheap special expires. (I want it, but it's not aviable in my area.)

But that would leave 20 players with a max 38Kb download speed (limited by your upload speed) each.

So that's probably going to be your biggest expense.

 

[dudeman007]

THANK YOU GUYS SO MUCH!

 

[BurnItDwn]

any old 10 year old video card will work fine for a dedicated server.

In BF 1942 or BF Vietnam, you could get by with 1ghz (however if you want to up the # of players or add bots to the game, then you'll need something around 2ghz (for like 30-40 players) or 3ghz for 60 players.
256MB of ram should be enough for a dedicated server for just about any game. Typically, dedicated server's will use less hard drive space than installing the full game.

I have an Athlon XP1800 with 256mb of ram and a 4GB hard drive running Slackware and a BF1942 Desert Combat server, I can usually set it to about 40 bots/players, and it will run pretty good, anything more than that and it becomes a lagfest for all the connected boxes.

I know for Battlefield 1942/Vietnam, if you want to run a server through the internet, you need a connection with a good upstream. A 3mbit / 256kbit comcast connection will only sustain about 3 or 4 players and even then it can be pretty laggy. A DSL connection with a 768KB upstream will sustain more (I think about 10 to 12 players before it gets too laggy, but still not 16-20 (unless you want everyone to have a ping of 100+.)

 

[tweeve2002]

I created a game server, It has a 2.8 P4C in it with 1GB of RAM the video is a Geforce 4 TI 4800, Also get a motherboard that has a Gigbyle LAN card on it you will want the bandwidth latter. My advice it that dont get a crappy video card because there will be at times then someone comes over any you will want to play a game and the only other computer is the server. Get a decent card not high end but not lowend either. My sudgestion is to get a Geforce 4 TI series or a 9600 those are good cards but arnt too much money.

Also the more RAM a server has the better. Games like BF1942 love RAM the more the better is runs. Im going to get another gig of RAM soon for my server.

 

[sharq]

Will this be setup on a LAN or on the web?

 

[dudeman007]

Thanks again you guys. This will be more web than lan. I have a cable connection, and if it lags a bit, I'm not too worried. I doubt I'll get more than 10 players at a time with the guys I know, but I want to think in terms of 16-20 people in case I have more people who want to play.