Versatile home gaming server

[garciasterling15]

Dear Ltt Friendos,

 

I'm currently looking into getting a home server primarily for hosting games for me and my friends(10-20ppl at most, maybe a bit more). I was thinking about getting a Threadripper 1920x with 128gb of ram on an x399 board. There's a bundle on Ebay (where I live) for 400€. Would there be a better option for the price?

 

I would host things like Minecraft, Rust, Terraria, Valheim, Palworld, Project Zomboid among other things(only one at a time though).

 

Would also love the possibility of being able to set up a NAS later down the road to host files on my home network. 

 

Would love to have your informed opinions on this! Thanks in advance

 

Kind Regards,

Sterling

 

[tkitch]

threadripper is for running a bunch of server things at once.

If you're only running one or two, you'd get better performance out of a decent consumer tier cpu.

[garciasterling15]

1 minute ago, tkitch said:

threadripper is for running a bunch of server things at once.

If you're only running one or two, you'd get better performance out of a decent consumer tier cpu.

Would it be fine to keep a consumer cpu running constantly for extended amounts of time?

[tkitch]

1 minute ago, garciasterling15 said:

Would it be fine to keep a consumer cpu running constantly for extended amounts of time?

most of us never turn off our computers, so yes

[Zando_]

22 minutes ago, garciasterling15 said:

Would it be fine to keep a consumer cpu running constantly for extended amounts of time?

Yep. CPUs are the same basic tech across the board. Enterprise motherboards can use higher quality capacitors and be built a tad better overall as they're intended for 24/7 operation with minimal downtime. If you're worried about that very small percentage chance of failure then you can just get a server board for a mainstream chip, ASRock and Supermicro make some. 

24 minutes ago, tkitch said:

If you're only running one or two, you'd get better performance out of a decent consumer tier cpu.

^^^ 1st gen Threadripper has poor single core performance (very important to many game servers as they are often single-threaded), and the power draw will be quite high vs a mainstream chip. It does add up when ran 24/7. Also, if you're running Windows as the host OS, 1st/2nd and 3rd gen TR still have TPM stutter with Windows (the whole system hitches for a couple milliseconds). AMD fixed this for AM4 but never bothered to for the X399 and TRX40 platforms. I believe if you run Windows 10 with TPM off it should dodge that, but W10 will be EOL sooner rather than later, so given there's 0 advantage to TR I don't see the point of trying to make it work for this to begin with. 

 

The best machine for this sorta thing is usually a 12th gen Intel based setup, as you can get DDR4 boards for them (cheaper RAM, though DDR5 is very cheap now so this matters less), they have very low idle power draw, and great single core performance. Anything Ryzen that's Zen 2 or newer is excellent as well. What exact chip you want depends on what board you wanna go with, and how many cores/threads you think you need. You can get up to 16c/32t on AM4/AM5.

[FlyingPotato_is_taken]

Get an old office PC prebuild. Something like 8th gen or newer.

Consider avoiding the HP prebuilds/EliteDesks as they don't support SR-IOV and other useful feature. 

 

 

 

[manikyath]

if you dont have a need for lots of PCIe, there's no reason to go beyond the "regular consumer stuff".

 

all that threadripper system will do for you is burn a bunch of power, and sit mostly idle while the cores that it *is* putting to work cant keep up with those of a more modern system.

 

128 gigs is a nice part of the deal.. depending on what sort of memory it is. and realisticly you really dont need 128.

 

just pieced a 'something something' together, dont take this as an exact parts list:

PCPartPicker Part List

CPU: AMD Ryzen 3 4100 3.8 GHz Quad-Core Processor  (€68.83 @ LIFE Informatica) 
Motherboard: Gigabyte A520M DS3H V2 Micro ATX AM4 Motherboard  (€68.00 @ Amazon Espana) 
Memory: Corsair Vengeance LPX 64 GB (4 x 16 GB) DDR4-3200 CL16 Memory  (€171.80 @ Amazon Espana) 
Total: €308.63
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2024-03-28 17:54 CET+0100

 

for pricing i just took a solid guess at the region, so take that for what it is..

 

past that, it's 300 bucks for cpu, motherboard, and 64GB RAM combo, the CPU chosen is only a quadcore, but each of those 4 cores is faster than the cores of the threadripper, and the platform will be more energy efficient.

given the budget you could probably even go for a ryzen 5 or 7, if you'd go all the way up to a 5800x you'd actually beat the threadripper.

 

oh - and all of this is coming from the proud owner of an AMD EPYC based home server.. only reason i went for that was PCIe lanes.