Multi-Game Dedicated Server Build

V1LL1ANS · October 9, 2020

Budget (including currency): $2500 (USD)

Country: USA

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for:

I am planning to build a dedicated game server to host an estimated 50 concurrent players. The difficult bit is that I want to run concurrent instances of multiple dedicated game servers at once (i.e. two different modded Minecraft instances, Just Cause 2, Astroneer, Terraria, etc.). Basically if it is possible to run a dedicated server for the game, if the userbase wants it, I want an instance of it running (with a max of 8 concurrent games up). The goal is that users can play different games at the same time off of the same server box. The build will also give me practice in managing/securing a server with a decent user base, writing monitoring/helper server scripts, and personal dev ops.

Other details:

CPU what I keep going back and forth on. While the conventional wisdom is use Intel for gaming (and Intel is what LTT used for their Minecraft server, albeit with two of them), since I plan on running multiple games off the same hardware at the same time, is it better to go with AMD for more cores/threads? While AMD is better for multicore workloads, and this build will be utilizing multiple cores to run the varying games, the cores will be working independently, so it won't actually be acting as a multicore process.

This project is not something I absolutely need to build now, so I can wait for benchmarks for Ryzen 3 architecture and Intel's 11 series. Also now that direct access storage is being implemented for PCs, that might be something to wait on as well.

I realize this is somewhat of a weird/dumb idea, so if that's what your commenting on... I know, but I'm still going to try and go through with it. I have seen plenty of builds for things like a dedicated Minecraft server, but I haven't really seen anything for the type of workload that I am planning for this machine.