Repurposing old servers, for mass multiboxing in WoW.

[Demolished]

So a quick bit of background, my current PC (Intel 6950X, 128GB Ram, GTX 1080) is capable of running up to 70 world of warcraft clients before the computer literally panics and starts crashing in all sorts of odd ways. I have heavily modified the wow clients to use next to 0 processing or graphical power. However the thing I cannot get around whatsoever is memory usage, both vram and ram. So with this, the most logical route is going for servers rather than faster computers, as it doesn't need a fast processor, just lots of cores and memory.

So with any information that people have today, I'm trying to find the cheapest builds I can go with to build several servers that can handle as many wow clients as possible. I honestly believe we could even go back to Intel Xeon E5 series chips, DDR2 Ram, etc. I am just having a hard time finding these things together, let alone working.

So what I'm looking for...
Dual socket CPU board, that has processors over 2Ghz with as many cores as possible, and capable of 128Gb of Ram.
128Gb of compatible ECC or FB ram.
Some old graphics cards that have/had a ton of VRam.

I'm honestly looking for most clients per dollar, and nothing more. I don't care how old the stuff is, I don't care how cheap/expensive it is. Obviously if I wait until the 64core threadripper comes out I could easily double my number of clients, but RAM is still a bottleneck. Sorry for the rant/TMI, just don't want to confuse anyone about what I'm trying to do.

So I don't need a build persay, just an idea of what is still readily available and cheap. Thanks in advance to any ideas people have!

[Mnky313]

48 minutes ago, Demolished said:

So a quick bit of background, my current PC (Intel 6950X, 128GB Ram, GTX 1080) is capable of running up to 70 world of warcraft clients before the computer literally panics and starts crashing in all sorts of odd ways. I have heavily modified the wow clients to use next to 0 processing or graphical power. However the thing I cannot get around whatsoever is memory usage, both vram and ram. So with this, the most logical route is going for servers rather than faster computers, as it doesn't need a fast processor, just lots of cores and memory.

So with any information that people have today, I'm trying to find the cheapest builds I can go with to build several servers that can handle as many wow clients as possible. I honestly believe we could even go back to Intel Xeon E5 series chips, DDR2 Ram, etc. I am just having a hard time finding these things together, let alone working.

So what I'm looking for...
Dual socket CPU board, that has processors over 2Ghz with as many cores as possible, and capable of 128Gb of Ram.
128Gb of compatible ECC or FB ram.
Some old graphics cards that have/had a ton of VRam.

I'm honestly looking for most clients per dollar, and nothing more. I don't care how old the stuff is, I don't care how cheap/expensive it is. Obviously if I wait until the 64core threadripper comes out I could easily double my number of clients, but RAM is still a bottleneck. Sorry for the rant/TMI, just don't want to confuse anyone about what I'm trying to do.

So I don't need a build persay, just an idea of what is still readily available and cheap. Thanks in advance to any ideas people have!

You can get something like a poweredge r820 for $550-600 with 128GB DDR3 ECC and 32 cores, 64 threads (4 CPUs, each 8 core with hyperthreading). Idk about running GPUs in it but I ran games (not well, but some need the game to be open to run a server) on a really old quadro in an r420. You can configure the system to use system ram as shared graphics ram as well and DDR3 ECC is REALLY cheap (like $1/GB)

[mariushm]

If you want loads of ram, socket G34 from AMD could be your thing.

You can get up to 512 GB with Registered ECC ram and 50-60$ gets you a pair of 16 core Opteron 6378 but the performance is basically half what you get with your 6950x

 

ex cpus.

1. https://www.ebay.com/itm/2x-AMD-Opteron-6376-6300-Series-16-Core-2-30MHz-Socket-G34-Server-CPU-Processor/153645141057

2. https://www.ebay.com/itm/2x-AMD-Opteron-6378-6300-Series-16-Core-2-40MHz-Socket-G34-Server-CPU-Processor/153645141106

 

mobos (dual cpu)

AMD H8DGI-F Motherboard Dual Socket G34 Opteron 6200 6300

Supermicro H8DGI-F Socket G34 AMD Opteron 6200 6300 Motherboard DDR3 With I/O

ASUS KGPE-D16 motherboard Socket G34 AMD SR5690 DDR3 100% working

 

single cpu:

Supermicro MBD-H8SGL-B Server Motherboard Amd Socket G34 SR5650 SP5100 Raid PCI

Supermicro Server Motherboard Amd Socket G34 CPU Processor MBD-H8SGL-B H8SGL-B

Supermicro H8SGL Server Motherboard ATX Motherboard Socket G34 DDR3 6x SATA Raid

Supermicro H8SGL-B Server Mainboard AMD Socket G34 16-Core Opteron 6300P Ready

Supermicro ATX Server Mainboard Socket AMD Base G34 DDR3 2x Gbe 6 x Sata Pci-E

 

16 GB sticks : https://www.ebay.com/itm/HYNIX-16GB-1X16GB-1333MHZ-PC3-10600-ECC-REGISTERED-DUAL-RANK-X4-1-35V/143439694393?epid=1750712484

 

 

 

[Demolished]

That's actually pretty reasonable price wise, considering my computer cost literally 6k 3 years ago, getting half that power for ~600 would be nice. There are a ton of miner cards that it looks like I'd be able to pick up to fill the graphics card dilemma too for about 100$ each. The cards basically need ~8Gb of VRam to be reasonable, not sure what AMD's crossfire does in terms of two cards VRam though, because Nvidia sucks with it.

[Corallus-Caninus]

I know this is old but google landed me here so its worth posting.

have you considered memory compression? if you have that much processing power you should be able to ramp up zswap considerably on linux (not sure about the windows answer but I know it implements memory compression). Also some m.2's should allow for reasonable swap although I have no idea what WoW multiboxing workload looks like or the responsiveness needed therein. If you're running all 70 applications on the OS (I think some people call it bare metal) you should consider virtualization (Virtualbox or something) for each client so they fail independently and can be restarted in software.