Server Hardware

[GeckoBoy84]

Hi there,

I am looking to build a server to host some websites, discord bots and minecraft servers on. I have a budget of $750-$1000. I am looking for a tower server to build/purchase and currently have no parts. It would also need to be very quiet as will be located in my room. I am new to server building but have built a few gaming/workstation PCs before. I do not believe I need to much storage, 2TBs would probably be plenty. For my uses I believe I need to focus on RAM and CPU, however I think that the CPUs are the most important part for this system, please correct me if I am wrong! Any suggestions would be very much appreciated.

 

Gecko!

Edited March 15, 2021 by GeckoBoy84
Wrong amount of storage!

[Eigenvektor]

Web server and Discord shouldn't need that much CPU, provided we're not talking millions of visitors a day and/or a demanding backend for the web app. For Minecraft you probably want a decent CPU and a fair bit of RAM, depending on the number of people using it concurrently.

 

You could take a look here as a starting point: https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Server/Requirements/Dedicated

 

I assume you want to host this at home? Is your bandwidth (upstream!) good enough?

[GeckoBoy84]

Thanks for the reply. I have a very major backend for the web app as it runs an online store and a dashboard for my discord bot. I have run a few bungee networks on minecraft before and am expecting a fair amount of players. My discord bot relies on a very large amount of my current CPU (an i3) so am looking to purchase/build this server. I am expecting to have 5 servers running bungee so probably need at least 32 GBs of RAM. Just not sure what would be good to pair with etc as never used server hardware before. Hopefully someone can help out with some ideas as to parts that would be good for my use and budget.

 

With regards to bandwidth, we are currently upgrading so will hopefully be good enough very soon.

 

@Eigenvektor

Edited March 14, 2021 by GeckoBoy84
Forgot to mention you!

[Dutch_Master]

Consider the following, no prices as you'd best search the web for the best deals;

• Fractal Design Define XL R2 big tower

• be quiet! Pure Power 11 400W PSU

• GIGABYTE B550 AORUS ELITE V2 mainboard

• AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 4750G

• ASUS GeForce GT 710 1GB GPU

• Alpenföhn "Ben Nevis" Rev. B cpu cooler

• Kingston 32 GB ECC Registered DDR4-3200 RAM (2x minimum)

• Mushkin Pilot-E, 1 TB SSD (2x, OS-drive/cache, RAID1)

• Toshiba N300, 4 TB HDD

• Seagate Exos 7E8 4 TB HDD

Both HDDs in RAID1 for long term storage. It's good practice to mix drives from various manufacturers to circumvent any issues with particular drive batches that may surface later. The case has 8x 3.5" bays, so plenty of room for future storage expansion.

 

You need a cheap GPU for booting the system, but if you need GPU power for your application, get what you can get your hands on in the current shortage and budget constraints. Keep in mind that you'd need to upgrade the PSU to 550W and more for higher performance GPU's.

 

Notice the RAM is ECC registered, important for data integrity and common in servers.

 

A pair of NVMe SSD's as both boot/OS drives and for caching/running your VM's/servers. these are PCIe gen 3, if you can stretch your budget, using PCIe gen 4 drives will make a noticeable difference in performance here. (4GB/s max vs 8GB/s max)

 

CPU is modest (65W) TDP, 8 core laptop chip, CPU-cooler is selected for quiet operation, as the system resides in your room. PSU reflects low power consumption, which will be appreciated by whomever pays the electricity bill

 

This is just an example, if you want different components feel free to deviate.

[Electronics Wizardy]

14 minutes ago, Dutch_Master said:

u need a cheap GPU for booting the system, but if you need GPU power for your application, get what you can get your hands on in the current shortage and budget constraints. Keep in mind that you'd need to upgrade the PSU to 550W and more for higher performance GPU's.

 

You shouldn't beed a dgpu here, as the cpu has a igpu on board.

 

14 minutes ago, Dutch_Master said:

Notice the RAM is ECC registered, important for data integrity and common in servers.

 

Registered ram won't work on am4, only unregistered ram will work. registered doesn't mean its ecc though, there is unregistered ecc ram.

 

ALso apus aren't great for ecc support, and since you have a igpu, just get the normal 3700x/3600 here.

 

15 minutes ago, Dutch_Master said:

A pair of NVMe SSD's as both boot/OS drives and for caching/running your VM's/servers. these are PCIe gen 3, if you can stretch your budget, using PCIe gen 4 drives will make a noticeable difference in performance here. (4GB/s max vs 8GB/s max)

 

No noticable performance difference going to gen 4, esp here where these isn't much io here. THe peak speeds really don't matter, things like iops and latency matter much more and its basically the same here.

 

16 minutes ago, Dutch_Master said:

CPU is modest (65W) TDP, 8 core laptop chip, CPU-cooler is selected for quiet operation, as the system resides in your room. PSU reflects low power consumption, which will be appreciated by whomever pays the electricity bill

 

TDP != power draw, and a desktop cpu uses about the same power at idle, so id just get a normal chip here. ALso since cpu usage is gonna be pretty low id just use the stock cooler. Should be silent for these uses.

 

 

[GeckoBoy84]

1 hour ago, Dutch_Master said:

• Fractal Design Define XL R2 big tower

• be quiet! Pure Power 11 400W PSU

• GIGABYTE B550 AORUS ELITE V2 mainboard

• AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 4750G

• ASUS GeForce GT 710 1GB GPU

• Alpenföhn "Ben Nevis" Rev. B cpu cooler

• Kingston 32 GB ECC Registered DDR4-3200 RAM (2x minimum)

• Mushkin Pilot-E, 1 TB SSD (2x, OS-drive/cache, RAID1)

• Toshiba N300, 4 TB HDD

• Seagate Exos 7E8 4 TB HDD

I have built a list of these parts (https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/user/GeckoBoy84/saved/#view=FhkbLk) however we are currently looking very over budget. Any further suggestions would be much appreciated!

One questions for the hard drives, is there much benefit (other than storage capacity) on having 2 HDDs in raid1? I probably won’t need more than the 4TBs storage! Do the boot drives need to be 1TB each if I am not storing any data on them?

 

Sorry for the many questions! Gecko

[Electronics Wizardy]

32 minutes ago, GeckoBoy84 said:

I have built a list of these parts (https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/user/GeckoBoy84/saved/#view=FhkbLk) however we are currently looking very over budget. Any further suggestions would be much appreciated!

One questions for the hard drives, is there much benefit (other than storage capacity) on having 2 HDDs in raid1? I probably won’t need more than the 4TBs storage! Do the boot drives need to be 1TB each if I am not storing any data on them?

 

Sorry for the many questions! Gecko

For those uses, id probably just get a i3 10100 or a i5 10400. Should be much cheaper now, and still plenty of cpu power for your uses. You can drop the gpu too with those cpus.

 

Probably can drop down like like 1tb or 500gb of ssd space.

 

What os are you using? Id probably put a hypervisor like linux on the hardware.

 

a

[Dutch_Master]

24 minutes ago, GeckoBoy84 said:

very over budget.

Yeah, that much is evident, isn't it You can save considerably on the CPU (Ryzen 3 or 5 at most), do away with one NVMe drive and reduce the RAM to 2x 16GB or 4x8. The pair of HDD's are there to protect you against data loss when (not if) one drive fails. Alternatively, forgo both NVMe and HDD drives and us a single high capacity NVMe, like the ADATA XPG Spectrix S40G RGB, 4 TB SSD. As SSD's are much less likely to fail (no moving parts for starters!) you may get away with everything on a single drive. Not sure if that actually saves you any money, these drives are still pretty expensive! But your server hardware would be very responsive

 

1 hour ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

TDP != power draw, and a desktop cpu uses about the same power at idle, so id just get a normal chip here. ALso since cpu usage is gonna be pretty low id just use the stock cooler.

I agree about the first part, but whenever the CPU is taxed more then just idle, a lower TDP keeps the noise down. Besides, the CPU I quoted doesn't have a stock cooler, these are EOM parts.

 

4 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

hypervisor like linux

Linux is not a hypervisor   It has a fair few to choose from, but Linux is just the OS (or if you want pedantic, just the kernel in a GNU/Linux system  )

[Electronics Wizardy]

Just now, Dutch_Master said:

Linux is not a hypervisor   It has a fair few to choose from, but Linux is just the OS (or if you want pedantic, just the kernel in a GNU/Linux system  )

oops meant proxmox, can't thinkie.

 

Just now, Dutch_Master said:

I agree about the first part, but whenever the CPU is taxed more then just idle, a lower TDP keeps the noise down. Besides, the CPU I quoted doesn't have a stock cooler, these are EOM parts.

 

Why get those apus? Id get a normal desktop chip here. There basically the same performance and your not using the igpu here.

[Dutch_Master]

13 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

oops meant proxmox, can't thinkie.

You are forgiven

 

14 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Why get those apus? Id get a normal desktop chip here. There basically the same performance and your not using the igpu here.

My experience is that APU's are very convenient when it comes to servers from consumer grade parts, as the GPU is already included. Now, admittedly, this is on pre-Zen platforms (AMD AM2, AM3, FM1, FM2 and FM2+). If Intel 9th and/or 10th gen has better performance for less beer tokens, then by all means the OP should build a system based on that. Having said that, I recently browsed Aliexpress and found interesting AMD Opteron sets (CPU+mainboard+RAM) in various core variants for not a lot of money. (200-230USD for 16 core). Didn't try, as I've just upgraded 4 systems for under 100USD. (by playing musical chairs with parts, as well as getting a 'new' (to me, at least) APU, an A10 PRO 8750B for about 40-ish USD)

[GeckoBoy84]

8 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

For those uses, id probably just get a i3 10100 or a i5 10400. Should be much cheaper now, and still plenty of cpu power for your uses.

Any ideas on a good motherboard combo?

https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/user/GeckoBoy84/saved/FhkbLk

[Electronics Wizardy]

Just now, GeckoBoy84 said:

Any ideas on a good motherboard combo?

https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/user/GeckoBoy84/saved/FhkbLk

Id get a 4tb hdds instead and a 500gb ssd, much cheaper.

 

ANy board should be fine, id get a midrange b460 one.

[GeckoBoy84]

1 hour ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Id get a 4tb hdds instead and a 500gb ssd, much cheaper.

 

ANy board should be fine, id get a midrange b460 one.

How is this looking?

https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/user/GeckoBoy84/saved/FhkbLk

[Electronics Wizardy]

7 hours ago, GeckoBoy84 said:

How is this looking?

https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/user/GeckoBoy84/saved/FhkbLk

Id get a single ssd and hdd. Then setup backups to an external or offsite cpu.

 

What os do you plan on running?

 

[GeckoBoy84]

2 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Id get a single ssd and hdd. Then setup backups to an external or offsite cpu.

 

What os do you plan on running?

 

I was planning to use windows/ windows server. Is there a benefit to using a HDD because I currently do not use more than 200GB of storage and can always add more down the line.

 

I was not planning on using external backups, would this be a good idea?

[Electronics Wizardy]

3 minutes ago, GeckoBoy84 said:

I was planning to use windows/ windows server. Is there a benefit to using a HDD because I currently do not use more than 200GB of storage and can always add more down the line.

 

I was not planning on using backups, would this be a good idea?

Well you said you would need 3tb in your post, so thats what I was going by.

 

Id run a hypervisor on the host, like hyper-v or proxmox. Don't just run windows server on the host. VMs make everything nice.

 

If you only neeed 200gb of storage, di just get a 500gb or 1tb ssd to  start.

 

Yea id use backups otherwise your data is all lost in case of a hardware failure, corruption, user error, malware/hacking or any other issues.

[GeckoBoy84]

3 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Well you said you would need 3tb in your post, so thats what I was going by.

Sorry I mistyped! Have edited now

 

Would I need to use external backups or could I setup to have 1 HDD for making backups and the SSD for storage?

[Electronics Wizardy]

Just now, GeckoBoy84 said:

Sorry I mistyped! Have edited now

 

Would I need to use external backups or could I setup to have 1 SSD for making backups and the other for storage?

Id keep the backups external, that way there is less of a chance something happens to them. Id probalby rotate 2 external hdds for backups. Don't really want a backup in the system incase malware, power surge, user error or other issues cause the backup and main disk to lose data at the same time.

[GeckoBoy84]

47 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Id keep the backups external, that way there is less of a chance something happens to them. Id probalby rotate 2 external hdds for backups. Don't really want a backup in the system incase malware, power surge, user error or other issues cause the backup and main disk to lose data at the same time.

Is there a way to do both on and offsite backups?

[Electronics Wizardy]

Just now, GeckoBoy84 said:

Is there a way to do both on and offsite backups?

Rotated external hdds is pretty easy and cheap way to do that.

 

You can also backup to a cloud service or a offsite nas. All depends on budget, time to recovery, and how much risk you want.

[GeckoBoy84]

Thanks for the help. I’ll let you all know if I have any further issues!