Budget (including currency): $1000 CAD
Country: Canada
Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Dedicated server for popular survival games such as minecraft, 7 days to die, ARK, The Forest etc.
Other details (existing parts lists, whether any peripherals are needed, what you're upgrading from, when you're going to buy, what resolution and refresh rate you want to play at, etc):
Existing spare parts in my inventory:
16gb ddr4 2666mhz g.skill ripjaws cl15
Rosewill photon 1050w Fully modular psu
Sapphire nitro rx 570 8gb
Various sata 3/6 hard drives (6 TB total)
PCIe Network cards
Various water cooling components.
What I'd like to do is run dedicated gaming servers through the steam tools applications, preferably on a windows 10 pro based machine (already have spare OS key). I would like to run 25-50 person servers depending on which games I am currently playing at the time, weather it be Minecraft, 7 days to die, ark or most other survival based games. My question is considering the parts I had listed above, is it with specing out an atx style dedicated server with a consumer grade cpu like a ryzen 5 or an i7, or would it be more beneficial to run an enterprise server such as a Dell PowerEdge R710/810 with 2-4 xeon CPUs (likley an x5570, e5 2620 v2, x5675 or similar xeon 6 core) 64-192gb ddr3 ECC ram, 2-4 TB SAS 10k drives in a raid config, and 2x psu in the ballpark of 800-1000w.
I am aware of the power consumption related with running enterprise hardware as well as the excessive noise produced by servers, especially in a smaller config like a 2u chassis. With that being said can anyone give me some opinions on hardware choices, if dedicated game servers rely on single threaded performance or multi thread, ram needs, how fast storage will fill on an average game server, and if consumer grade windows 10 pro can be installed on server hardware.
Thanks in advance for the suggestions and advice!
Thanks for the reply boggy! I was playing with the idea of going ryzen, but the main reasons stopping me were the the fact that I already have an amd 8350 with motherboard and 24gb ddr3 ram sitting around doing nothing. With that being said I revisited the "ultimate Minecraft server" episode and took note of the build requirements, which appear to rely on single threaded performance, a reasonable amount of storage and 32 GB of RAM if I am not mistaken. Linus did specifically mention that this would be one of the few cases where running a xeon server would offer a much worse user experience. LSo with that said, does anyone have suggestions for a motherboard/cpu combo that would crush single threaded performance, be able to handle minimum 64gb of RAM for future expansion and support nvme storage for around $600 CAD? That should leave me enough budget left to finish out the build for the total price of around $1000. Thanks!
