Building a Minecraft Server, need CPU advice.

[Psyckosama]

I was able to pick up several old Dell Optiplex 780s, old Core 2 Duo systems with 4 gigs of system memory at an extreme discount. I had enough free floating DDR3 2gig ram sticks to bring them all up to 8 Gigs. I'd like to upgrade the CPUs to something a but more capable.

 

I'm thinking either the Q9400 or an E8500. The Q9400 has the advantage of being a quad core, while the E8500 has higher clocks. Both are absolutely dirt cheap on ebay, and are compatible with the system.

 

I've heard Minecraft is extremely single threaded (unless I've heard wrong, feel free to correct me) which favors the E8500, but at the same time the Q9400 is all and all more practically useful.

 

What do you think and why?

[Psyckosama]

6 hours ago, Andrew.Schickowski said:

almost any processor will run minecraft smoothly i thought this question was a joke at first

Yes. I used to be able to run it on a Pentium 3.

 

But allow me to reiterate. SERVER. As in DEDICATED SERVER. As in a host for tens of players with a world that will be ever growing.

 

I'd like to figure out which would be the smoother configuration for that.

[KuJoe]

Minecraft is more RAM heavy than CPU heavy, any CPU should work. I've had clients host servers with a single CPU core, the Java process just ate up RAM like crazy.

[GloriousPain]

OC the 9400; or just run the 8500 I think are your two best bets given these options...

 

But I'd suggest getting something better... tbh LGA 775 stuff to be beyond it's point of usefulness even in low budget circumstances; LGA 1366/1155/1156 all have options that can rival it in price. There are plenty of first/second/third gen i3/5/7 dell optiplexes and such... you can slap in $5-25 xeons to achieve far better results.

 

Another quick thing to note; Minecraft (especially server side) is far more DISK and RAM heavy than actually CPU heavy. 

 

If I were to be doing a budget minecraft server. I'd probably try to get one of the above mentioned Sandy/Ivy Bridge setups; 8-16GB of RAM, and a cheap but decent 128GB SSD. 

[corrado33]

2 minutes ago, GloriousPain said:

OC the 9400; or just run the 8500 I think are your two best bets given these options...

 

But I'd suggest getting something better... tbh LGA 775 stuff to be beyond it's point of usefulness even in low budget circumstances; LGA 1366/1155/1156 all have options that can rival it in price. There are plenty of first/second/third gen i3/5/7 dell optiplexes and such... you can slap in $5-25 xeons to achieve far better results.

 

Another quick thing to note; Minecraft (especially server side) is far more DISK and RAM heavy than actually CPU heavy. 

 

If I were to be doing a budget minecraft server. I'd probably try to get one of the above mentioned Sandy/Ivy Bridge setups; 8-16GB of RAM, and a cheap but decent 128GB SSD. 

I'd argue with you on the 775 stuff not being useful anymore. (I say as I sit next to my OCed 775 rig). Although the stuff you mentioned is newer and roughly the same price so if the OP were buying everything, I'd say go newer, but if he already has a 775, it's perfectly usable. 

[GloriousPain]

Just now, corrado33 said:

I'd argue with you on the 775 stuff not being useful anymore. (I say as I sit next to my OCed 775 rig). Although the stuff you mentioned is newer and roughly the same price so if the OP were buying everything, I'd say go newer, but if he already has a 775, it's perfectly usable. 

Uhm maybe I worded it wrong... It's definitely usable. I guess the better comparison is I don't find it to have any "value" as in it's price to performance ratio is beaten by things that match it in price making it essentially just a bad buy because you can buy better for the same price. Much like years back when Linus reviewed the like R5 240? Or whatever low end graphics card; and he gave it a piss poor review because it almost NEVER made sense to buy because there was readily available  things that beat it in it's own price category albeit from the used market... AND because higher end stuff beat it by wide margins even with the price discrepancy. 

 

You know what I'm saying. It just doesn't make sense to purchase it given the market. At this point even at the very very very bottom end of budgets where you're forced in to "Scrapyarding" where you goto scrap yards and buy the PC parts based on their scrap weight... Nehalem, Westmere, Sandy, and Ivy bridge are all starting to appear at said scrapyards as well. 

[corrado33]

1 minute ago, GloriousPain said:

Uhm maybe I worded it wrong... It's definitely usable. I guess the better comparison is I don't find it to have any "value" as in it's price to performance ratio is beaten by things that match it in price making it essentially just a bad buy because you can buy better for the same price. Much like years back when Linus reviewed the like R5 240? Or whatever low end graphics card; and he gave it a piss poor review because it almost NEVER made sense to buy because there was readily available  things that beat it in it's own price category albeit from the used market... AND because higher end stuff beat it by wide margins even with the price discrepancy. 

 

You know what I'm saying. It just doesn't make sense to purchase it given the market. At this point even at the very very very bottom end of budgets where you're forced in to "Scrapyarding" where you goto scrap yards and buy the PC parts based on their scrap weight... Nehalem, Westmere, Sandy, and Ivy bridge are all starting to appear at said scrapyards as well. 

Agreed, if the OP is buying EVERYTHING used, then go newer, but if he already has 775, it'll work fine. 

[GloriousPain]

Just now, corrado33 said:

Agreed, if the OP is buying EVERYTHING used, then go newer, but if he already has 775, it'll work fine. 

Yeah; true. Was just stating what I'd suggest if he really wanted to make sure to get the most out of his budget. Because he mentions having several of those optiplexes just selling a couple of them could buy all the things I listed (newer optiplex+moreram+SSD)

[Pasi123]

I'd recommend a quad core. For a short time I hosted my Minecraft server on a Core2 Duo E8400 system with 8gb of ram and it run at 100% usage when there was like 40-50 players. That amount of players wasn't a problem for my dual Xeon E5420 server with 32gb of ram.

That was back in 2013 so I don't know how different it is nowadays.

 

For small amount of players the E8500 shouldn't be too bad. I first started my server in 2012 on a Pentium 4 HT 3.0GHz PGA478 system with 2gb of DDR1 memory and it was able to run server with 15 players and about 35 plugins without too much lag.

[Psyckosama]

I already own them. One computer has a E8500 (had it lying around in my parts bin) already.

 

The other two have E7400s. Two have been upgraded to 8 and one 6 gigs using the two gig sticks of ram I had laying around. The three of them cost me a combined 23 USD.

 

The reason I'm going with LGA775 is because I was able to pick up the systems at a flea market for so ridiculously cheap that even of only the Hard Drives worked, it would have been a net gain at the price.

 

I'm thinking of simply picking up the cheapest 2 gig stick on ebay (if I can't find some guy another compatible computer at the market) and a pair of used processors to finish my little flea-market server rack.