Help in hardware selection for new system!!

BrianW

Our Cs clan and our DoD clan have raised money to buy a server. We are going to run a CS pub server, and a DoD match server on it. The below three systems are what we are considering. We will run Gentoo 1.4 for the os.

1) Dual P4 Xeon 2.4 (533mhz fsb), 2 X 512 PC-2100 ECC DDR

2) Dual Athlon MP 2800+ Barton Core, 2 X 512 PC-2100 ECC DDR

3) Dual Opteron 1.4, 2 X 512 PC2700 ECC DDr

What do you think. What would you prefer, and why? Obviously we would run the opterons in 32 bit mode until Gentoo comes out with 64bit support. No need to do that, until a game with smp and 64bit support comes out.

Brian
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squanto · Posted: Wed Nov 19, 2003 2:30 am Post subject:

Do you really need THAT much power to run 2 servers on the same machine?
What kind of bandwidth do you have? Atleast a couple of T1s will be required to satisfy users, so maybe spend more on bandwidth and less on a machine?

I have run two 32 person RTCW servers on the same 900MHz PIII with no problems, so I would assume you could get a nice 1.5GHz system and run both your servers as well with no problems.
With those two servers running I was sucking up about 5Mbit/sec of my connection...

I know that most of the "pay for game server" places run five to six 32 person games on each dual processor machine as well. So your specs for processors is probably enough or too much. Do you plan to have any kind of other services running on the machines, such as web server with php stats, and a forum for your clan?

dizzey · n00b Joined: 03 Oct 2003 Posts: 40

i would go for the dual mp its cheap and alot of bang for the buck.
some friends have a dual mp2000+ with 1gbram and its a bublic server
its not too uncomon that they run other gameservers on it as well and they have never had
performace issues.

i personaly have the impression that the mp:s runs better in linux than the xeon i could be wrong.
and im not sure but i belive the xeon share the same bus but on the mp the cpus have one each.

i belive the opteron would be overkill better to use the money on more ram and faster disk system pherhaps a 3ware card. for a gameserver ram and disk would probobly the bottelneck before the
cpus dont keep up

BrianW · Posted: Wed Nov 19, 2003 2:35 am Post subject:

Well we also want to build it for future use as a hl2 server, so the overhead is fine. The server only costs either 850 or 950, so the cost is nice. The server will be going into a datacenter in San Jose, CA. They have mass bandwidth. Free hosting, so all funds go towards server. Which of the three systems would run better do you think? Or are the differences negligable?

Thanks,

Brian
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dizzey · n00b Joined: 03 Oct 2003 Posts: 40

i would just go for the cheapest one and then bef up the ram and the disk system
with a hardware raid card. as stated eraliarer i dont think the cpu will be the bottleneck
in any of these systems. heck i would even buy a bit slower cpus if i got better disk performace and more ram.

BrianW · Posted: Wed Nov 19, 2003 2:45 am Post subject:

dizzey · n00b Joined: 03 Oct 2003 Posts: 40

yeah if your only run two servers an ata should be sufficent.
it will be nice to here how it goes

squanto · Posted: Wed Nov 19, 2003 6:13 am Post subject:

Just to be safe, maybe get 2 ata drives, and do a software raid 1 on them? Then if one dies you dont have any down time.
I'd say go with two drives in raid 1, and the dual MP, and then get as much ram as you can afford. Maybe even just dual 2000mp's, and then get more ram? or just save money.

Take your clan out to dinner

free hosting, thats nice

BrianW · Posted: Wed Nov 19, 2003 6:26 am Post subject:

The motherboard has serial ata raid controller. Any chance I could get that working on Gentoo?

Here are the proposed motherboards:

1) http://www.chaintech.com.tw/tw/eng/product_spec.asp?MPSNo=13&PISNo=19

IDE Raid Info: On board IDE RAID Controller Promise PDC20265R IDE RAID controller supports extra two UltraDMA -100/133 IDE ports with RAID 0/1

2) http://tw.giga-byte.com/Server/Products/Products_GA-7DPXDW-P.htm

IDE Raid Info: Promise® PDC 20276 RAID Controller

Any experience with these controllers and Gentoo? Another question. We usually use ext3 partitions. What are your thoughts? Could I use this on the raid array?

Brian
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squanto · Posted: Fri Nov 21, 2003 7:17 pm Post subject:

I've heard good things about promise cards, but can't speak for those models exactly. Worst case you can always do a software raid, and then you have option to do a raid 5 as well.

ext3 should be fine for raid use, but do a little reading at tldp.org maybe? http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Software-RAID-HOWTO-4.html

nmcsween · Guru Joined: 12 Nov 2003 Posts: 381

Jebus Dual proc systems? for simply running two game servers? A few things you really don't need: A. Ecc is overkill for a game server. B. A Intel P4 with HT will do and save you a huge amount of cash. Things you Need: Two small scsi hard drives or sata on raid stripped array. About 2GB of ram and a very friendly isp that will let you suck 5Mbps of bandwidth. Remember that bandwidth that high will cost you near $200 a month.

BrianW · Posted: Sat Nov 22, 2003 4:03 am Post subject:

Well earlier in the thread I mentioned that the hosting will be free, and at a colo where he has permission to run the HL servers.

How good is the linux(Gentoo 1.4 with gentoo kernel) implementation of HT?

A scsi card and drives just adds so much to the cost. Especially raid cards. Let me do some configs. What proc speed of the P4 ht would you recommend. Let me do some configs and see the cost.

Thanks for all the advice guys!

BrianW
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ctford0 · Posted: Sat Nov 22, 2003 7:18 am Post subject:

nmcsween · Guru Joined: 12 Nov 2003 Posts: 381

To simply put it ctford0 Say whaaaaaat? two athlon mp's cost near $350 CDN one Pentium at 2.6ghz with ht is about $235 CDN then again a athlon motherboard costs about $60 less, simply to put it a pentium has better ram performance since it runs at 800mhz 400mhz ram works well with it as for the athlons they run at 266mhz and it's a waste to use more than 266mhz ram. In other words its all up to you since both of them have a trade off at some point. Now if you have oodles of cash you could get a dual xeon with 533mhz ram. But thats about 99 44/100% overkill for running two simple game servers. Ram is your best friend when it comes to speed with 2-3GB of ram you could load the whole os into memory and the game with maps. Remeber that both Amd and Intel have a good and bad side.

MADcow · Posted: Sun Nov 23, 2003 3:00 am Post subject:

considering that 64 bit gentoo isn't that great yet, and CS definately doesn't have a 64 bit server, i would get the dualie 2800+
or something lesser and buy more bandwidth
EDIT: how the **** did you raise that much money?

MorphiusFaydal · Posted: Sun Nov 23, 2003 3:08 am Post subject:

go to NewEgg.com

get the dual Athlon MPs. They are the cheapest chips that will still perform excellently. the opterons are overkill, and arnt as good... the P$ system is WAAAYYY to expensive..

go get the dual MPs, drop the ECC ram, and get normal ram, stick two gigs in there, if you can, middle-sized SATA drives, or RAID..

and you will have a server that will be able to run HL2 dedicated server when it comes out.

We Hope.

so.. yeah..

chris
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nmcsween · Guru Joined: 12 Nov 2003 Posts: 381

<--Points MorphiusFaydal to any benchmark. Trust me after looking at the design of the pentium and the athlon mp I've seen that pentium's are more expensive but have better performance. 266mhz fsb vs 800mhz? I know that 800mhz is quadpumped but it still is better with higher clocked ram i.e 400mhz ram while the athlon mp runs along at 266mhz but also anyone using ram should match it with the fsb and not exceed it 266mhz ram vs 400.

MorphiusFaydal · Posted: Sun Nov 23, 2003 3:56 am Post subject:

yeah.. but hes only lookin at the 533 fsb speed..

that is cheaper.. but for what hes lookin for.. the MPs will be sufficient.. even for HL2

i have an XP1800+.. and i like it.. i find that it performs better than my friends P41.8.. so the MP should be about equivalent to the P4..

Chris
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tmsfnny · n00b Joined: 07 Mar 2003 Posts: 10

If you're just running HL and not storing any junk then get the Western Digital Raptor SATA drives. They're only 36gb but they're 10,000 rpm with 8mb cache. That should load those maps really fast on striped RAID. Just keep them cool with a nice 120mm fan (PanaFlo!).

I have no clue as to the performance differences between those platforms when running HL server. You might want to try and find some benchmarks with HT, on athlon, with dual proc, on Xeon, and so on. Some tests by IBM showed HT gave some huge performance gains in webservers for some tasks but no gain in others. Is HL server one of those things that benefits a lot? Also for servers a large cache typically speeds things up significantly under high load. Maybe Intel Extreme or Xeon is useful because of the 2mb L3 cache? Probably not unless you were near capacity but it's worth considering.

I highly prefer Intel's motherboards to the junk available for AMD. The i875 has integrated gigabit ethernet in the northbridge. This might significantly improve performance by taking a lot of traffic off the PCI bus. Especially when you're talking about 5mbit/sec sustained (or more).

As for the ECC ram it's not really 10% loss like someone said, more like 2-3%. That's still a lot, but if you put 2gb of ram in there it will be more likely you will have a failure as the chances go up as you have more ram. Although large sticks of fast ram are hard enough to get. Large sticks of fast ECC ram will cost you a pretty penny.

nmcsween · Guru Joined: 12 Nov 2003 Posts: 381

Think about this... the game was designed about 4 years ago. You don't need any extreme edition or 64bit proc to run a game that used to be played on 400mhz machines with no problem. My best answer after thinking this through would be to get two machines at about 1.6ghz to 2.2ghz you get high redundancy and faster disk acsess (with sata) more speed and a cheaper price.

ctford0 · Posted: Mon Nov 24, 2003 6:20 pm Post subject:

BrianW · Posted: Mon Nov 24, 2003 10:17 pm Post subject:

Could not find one benchmark or comparison article in reference to HLDS server hardware. Checked out dome hosting sites, and see that they usually use dual proc systems of low ghz...

So I do believe I will go for the dual MP system, in hopes that hl2ds will be multithreaded...

As far as ecc or non-ecc, I was always told that 2 gb and over it is always best to go with ecc. Since it is PC2100 the price is not so bad.

As far as disk system. We are getting donated an ultra320 raid card and 3 drives so we can run raid5 on em. I think this would be best.

Config: Dual Barton core procs 2800+, 2 gb of ecc ddr266, 3 18gb scsi320 drives in raid 5.

Thoughts?

Brian
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MADcow · Posted: Tue Nov 25, 2003 3:07 am Post subject:

send me one, too

squanto · Posted: Tue Nov 25, 2003 7:42 am Post subject:

MADcow · Posted: Tue Nov 25, 2003 8:08 pm Post subject:

i still want to know how you raised all that money...