Suggestions for Home/game/LAN server

[Tegneren]

Me an my brothers are planning on taking our quite large extended family and friends to the next level in Gaming and LAN events, and are looking to make a games server. IT will probably function as a home/media server as well, but the main purpose is hosting games such as Valheim, Minecraft etc. for maybe as many as 10-20 people.

We are also considering using it as a Steam cashe server.

 

My first thought was getting something newer consumer grade such as the PCPP list below, but I also found an older server with 2x Intel Xeon E5-2640 and 16GB DDR4 for a little cheaper.

What are the drawback of going with an older server? What is important for a game server?

 

Also feel free to suggest different hardware. Budget is around $450 / 5000 NOK (location is Norway)

I didn't include a case in the list as it will be rack mounted, and PCPP didn't seem to have an option fort that. It will be procured separately and its not included in budget.

 

PCPartPicker Part List: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/3msn4M

CPU: Intel Core i5-12500 3 GHz 6-Core Processor  ($195.98 @ Amazon) 
CPU Cooler: Thermalright Assassin X SE 32.77 CFM CPU Cooler  ($16.89 @ Amazon) 
Motherboard: Gigabyte H610M K DDR4 Micro ATX LGA1700 Motherboard  ($98.79 @ MemoryC) 
Memory: Corsair Vengeance LPX 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR4-3200 CL16 Memory  ($67.98 @ Amazon) 
Storage: Crucial P5 Plus 500 GB M.2-2280 PCIe 4.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive 
Power Supply: be quiet! Pure Power 11 400 W 80+ Gold Certified ATX Power Supply  ($83.90 @ Amazon) 
Total: $463.54
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2024-04-08 16:06 EDT-0400

[manikyath]

2 hours ago, Tegneren said:

an older server with 2x Intel Xeon E5-2640

minecraft servers essentially run on a single thread, so this for that is a horrible idea.

 

the modern i5 is also faster than 2x E5-2640 while consuming less power than one of them.

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/1216vs4675vs1907/Intel-Xeon-E5-2640-vs-Intel-i5-12500-vs-Intel-i7-4770

 

i've also added an i7-4770 to my list, because i've been batting at an odd performance issue with villagers on minecraft, and that's the cpu i'm running said tests on, and at times one village gets me to around ~20ms tick time (above 50 the server starts skipping ticks aka lagging) being on there just by myself with a bunch of villagers.

[MATT The Geek]

32gb of ram seems a little bit low to me especially if you get near 20 people as it is recommended at east 4gb of ram per Minecraft instance your motherboard supports up to 64gbs and that seems a little more realistic to me especially if you get into more demanding titles. Realistically you should get 128gbs of ram but that requires upgrading your motherboard which would therefore increase your budget

[manikyath]

7 hours ago, MATT The Geek said:

if you get near 20 people as it is recommended at east 4gb of ram per Minecraft instance

that's not how minecraft servers work. you can easily run a 20 person minecraft server on 4 gigs assuming you dont cake it with mods.

[Tegneren]

11 hours ago, manikyath said:

minecraft servers essentially run on a single thread, so this for that is a horrible idea.

 

7 hours ago, MATT The Geek said:

it is recommended at east 4gb of ram per Minecraft instance

Ok, so basically high single core speed and more RAM should be prioritized?

 

Any Idea how it would affect things when running both a Minecraft and a Valheim server simultaniously?

I dont really think 20 players at the same time is realistic, more likely it would be around 10

 

The plan is to run the game servers constantly, but most likely everyone would be playing the same game at any one time.

[Tegneren]

2 minutes ago, manikyath said:

that's not how minecraft servers work. you can easily run a 20 person minecraft server on 4 gigs assuming you dont cake it with mods.

Ok, so 32GB would be enough then for most things?

[manikyath]

38 minutes ago, Tegneren said:

Ok, so basically high single core speed and more RAM should be prioritized?

 

Any Idea how it would affect things when running both a Minecraft and a Valheim server simultaniously?

I dont really think 20 players at the same time is realistic, more likely it would be around 10

 

The plan is to run the game servers constantly, but most likely everyone would be playing the same game at any one time.

for minecraft, the more single core speed the better. the 'bottleneck' is always the tick thread, which as the name implies is a single threaded operation. the amoutn of ram you want depends on a lot of factors, but 4-8GB allocated should be plenty.

the suggestion for valheim appears to be 4-6 cores, and memory requirements seem to be 2-8GB depending on your needs.

 

i'm also gonna assume there wont be a situation where both servers will be full of people causing load, so while you might want to account for the total memory usage, the "adding up of cpu usage" is much more lenient, so the i5 you proposed is probably more than plenty.

 

to put some context behind this, i've never hosted valheim, but it seems to have simular enough requirements that i can use my conan exiles experience.

i've used before mentioned i7-4770 to host multiple minecraft servers, multiple gmod servers, and a conan exiles server simultaniously, alongside of some other random minor stuff like a discord bot.

it took all of that to 'fill' the 32GB RAM this system is maxed out to, and the cpu was fine as long as none of the servers was going haywire.

[Tegneren]

16 minutes ago, manikyath said:

for minecraft, the more single core speed the better. the 'bottleneck' is always the tick thread, which as the name implies is a single threaded operation. the amoutn of ram you want depends on a lot of factors, but 4-8GB allocated should be plenty.

the suggestion for valheim appears to be 4-6 cores, and memory requirements seem to be 2-8GB depending on your needs.

 

i'm also gonna assume there wont be a situation where both servers will be full of people causing load, so while you might want to account for the total memory usage, the "adding up of cpu usage" is much more lenient, so the i5 you proposed is probably more than plenty.

 

to put some contract behind this, i've never hosted valheim, but it seems to have simular enough requirements that i can use my conan exiles experience.

i've used before mentioned i7-4770 to host multiple minecraft servers, multiple gmod servers, and a conan exiles server simultaniously, alongside of some other random minor stuff like a discord bot.

it took all of that to 'fill' the 32GB RAM this system is maxed out to, and the cpu was fine as long as none of the servers was going haywire.

Thank you. This is some good info.