Visual Vincent

That is of course true, and oddly enough something I hadn't thought of yet. In Sweden all online stores are required by law to give customers a 14-day return policy. You are allowed to open the packaging and inspect the item (for instance turn it on), but not make any modifications to it (I guess I could run a live Linux USB to test it)

Thanks for your input. I know balancing silence/heat and performance is one of the great challenges of PC building. What drives me towards wanting a decently silent system is that I'm more or less allergic to noise. I wouldn't be able to sleep very well with the humm from my desktop PC that I'm writing this reply on right now (it's an older system from 2016 with an Intel stock fan). My PC is located right next to my bed, whereas the server will go in the next room close to the wall (however the walls and doors are rather thin)

I plan to use either Arch Linux or Debian (I have experience with both, mostly the former). Thanks a lot for the suggestion. Unfortunately, comparing the benchmarks (although I know those are usually not 100% accurate) it seems the i5-8500 has the worst single thread performance of them all (even worse if it's an i5-8500T, which some 7060's seem to have). The seller also doesn't seem to ship to Sweden, which is where I'm from.

Hi all! I'm back again, a year later, still looking for server options (my economy took a nose-dive suddenly, so I didn't have the money to get one last time) I'm looking to get myself a relatively small PC that I can use to host a few small game servers. I've narrowed my search down to two candidates, and I was hoping the LTT community could help me pick out a winner. My biggest issue is that I have a tight budget (roughly $700) and no good place to actually put the server, so there are three main things which I'm rather concerned about: Noise - The most important point for me. As it will be located somewhere close to my bedroom I don't want it to be too loud/noisy at nights. Size - Having no dedicated place to put it, the smaller it is, the easier it will be to move if I'm not satisfied with its location (e.g. due to noise). Temperature - I'd prefer if it didn't turn the room it's located in into a sauna (I realize of course that being on 24/7 some heating up is inevitable). The servers I'm expecting to run are: 1 vanilla Minecraft server Avg. player count: 4-10 1-2 Zandronum servers (classic DOOM online) Avg. player count: 8-20 (only on one server at a time, also the engine's rather good at handling many players) 1 MySQL database (Occasionally one Garry's Mod server || Avg. player count: 4-12) I expect no more than 2-3 servers to be up at the same time, and that only 1-2 of them will actually have any active players. Now, as of late some really interesting candidates has popped up, and I'm currently deciding between the following two finalists: Dell EMC PowerEdge T40 (Xeon E-2224G @ 3.5 GHz) - $395 ASUS MiniPC PN50 (Ryzen 7 4800U @ 1.8 GHz) - $664 [ Benchmarks ] Pros/Cons of the Dell T40 + An actual workstation PC with a server CPU + REALLY cheap! + Most likely scales better + Good CPU clocks and single thread rating + Have the budget to upgrade to the 6C/6T Xeon E-2226G - Slightly larger, harder to move around/find a good place for - Possibly noisier than the MiniPC when idle/low-medium load - Potentially dissipates a lot of heat - More power costly - Only 4C/4T Pros/Cons of the ASUS MiniPC + Very small, easy to move around (can basically be placed anywhere) + Many cores and threads (8C/16T) + Possibly the more silent option at idle/low-medium load + Likely won't dissipate as much heat due to its small size - Potential throttling if it can't dissipate heat efficiently enough - Thermals and/or throttling could make the servers laggy - Potentially noisy fan during higher loads (and for longer periods than the T40) - Rather low base clock (1.8 GHz), may cause lag? Thanks a lot in advance! Sorry for the long post.

@xreaperx22 Just to be clear: 1 gigabyte like you said is 8 Gbps (gigabit per second -- but I assume that is what you actually meant), but I have 100 Mbps (megabit per second) which is only about 12.5 megabytes per second. Though it's still a fast connection and should not be a problem for the numbers I anticipate.

@xreaperx22 Thanks for your reply! Where I live 1 Gbps is somewhat expensive. I've got 100 Mbps both up and down right now, and so far that hasn't been a bottleneck so I won't be upgrading until I notice any.

@Salv8 (sam) Au contraire, from my experience games (or at least game servers) are pretty bad at utilizing multiple cores, not to mention multiple threads. For instance, here is a guide on how to enable a more multithreaded setup for GMOD - it supports it, but it's not enabled by default: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=693814244 And I've modded a bit for Minecraft and can confirm after seeing the source code that the server uses a couple of threads but not an extreme amount, meaning it might benefit from, say, two cores. 1.14 apparently changed a lot in an attempt to improve multithreading however, so I don't know what that'll require.

Thank you for your reply, @Salv8 (sam). As I understand it most game servers ever only utilize one CPU core and one or two threads, so shouldn't dedicating one core for each server help spread out the load and keep the servers somewhat separate? (I'm assuming that's what you meant when you said separate) For instance if I set the MC server to only run on the first core and the GMOD server only on the second? As stated my budget is somewhere around $650-$750, and I've managed to find an Intel NUC build with an i7 for around $670 and a custom build with the Ryzen for about $780 (the extra $30 is not a problem). With the help of your reply I'm thinking of choosing the NUC as it is relatively small and low-power. Just hoping that that won't be a problem (e.g. throttling) and that the CPU is as good as it seems.

Hi LTT community! I am looking to build a dedicated server to host a couple of game servers, probably something around the lines of: 1 vanilla or modded Minecraft server || Player count: 6-10 1-2 Garry's Mod servers || Player count: 8-12 combined 1-2 Zandronum servers (classic DOOM online) || Player count: 8-20 combined (NOTE: the least CPU-intensive server of the three) If possible I'd like to keep the build small, low-power and low-noise (to the extent possible), but since I at the same time want to have decent performance I have been looking at various options for either/or. Right now I'm deciding between the following: An Intel NUC Bean Canyon with an i5-8259U CPU (4 cores, 8 threads @ 2.3 GHz) -- A small, low-power and low-noise choice. An Intel NUC Bean Canyon with an i7-8559U CPU (4 cores, 8 threads @ 2.7 GHz) -- Another small, low-power and low-noise choice. A custom build with a Ryzen 5 3600 (6 cores, 12 threads @ 3.6 GHz) -- The good performance choice. Someone said that for most game servers, having a CPU with good Single Thread Performance is important. I get that, so I started comparing the three. The Ryzen is of course superior in every way (links below), so my question to you is: Is the Bean Canyon with an i5-8259U / i7-8559U enough, or should I go for a custom build with a Ryzen 5 3600? Additional information: Planned OS: Some kind of Linux distribution, 64-bit. Planned RAM: DDR4 16-32 GB Planned storage: 240 GB SSD (for now) Budget: $650-$750 Planned uptime: 24/7 CPU Comparisons: Comparison of all three: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/AMD-Ryzen-5-3600-vs-Intel-i5-8259U-vs-Intel-i7-8559U/3481vs3299vs3302 i5-8259U vs I7-8559U: https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i5-8259U-vs-Intel-Core-i7-8559U/m543736vsm543591 i5-8259U vs Ryzen 5 3600: https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i5-8259U-vs-AMD-Ryzen-5-3600/m543736vs4040 i7-8559U vs Ryzen 5 3600: https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-8559U-vs-AMD-Ryzen-5-3600/m543591vs4040 As seen in the first link, the i7-8559U and the Ryzen 5 3600 has quite similar single thread performance.

The custom one wasn't stable, no. It's been a tough decision. Since Vega is still so new there isn't all that much information about it, but from what I've gathered it seems to have some annoying issues that AMD should fix (fluctuating GPU clock being one of them). A guy at Reddit thougt I should take the cheaper card in this case (RX 580) and save my money for what comes after Vega (this was after I'd made my decision, but I can't say I disagree ).

Thanks for your input. Actually one of the tests were made with a pre-release of ASUS's Vega Strix card (3 fans).

Thanks for all your helpful replies! I've decided to go with the 580 after some additional time of considering and studying performance charts. Notably it seems both Vega 56 and 64 has some issues retaining a stable GPU clock frequency, whilst an RX 580 almost always runs at the same frequency.

When you say "as far as you should go", do you mean from the price perspective or...?

Thanks for your reply. 560 is basically just an overclocked 460 (with only a few, minor hardware improvements). I need a more "stable performance"-card.

Thanks for your replies! I realized the demands for 100-200 FPS might have been a bit optimistic (at least for certain games). I have edited my main post and included some more (and perhaps better) info: One of my main concerns is getting a stable gaming experience, which might be better to express like this rather than in FPS form. I think I could cope with Vega 56's temperatures and power usage, though not Vega 64's.