# 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

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?

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## dizzey

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

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## BrianW

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

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.

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## BrianW

 *dizzey wrote:*   

> 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 
> ...

 

Well I am thinking of going with the MP system any way. Do you think 1 GB is enough memory? It is PC2100 ECC DDR 2 512 stucks. The server does not use the page file. So disk performance is really only a concern when loading maps. Not too worried there. A good ata drive coupled woth correct hdparm settings should be fast enough. From your posts, our server should fare just fine. I will update with some results in a few weels when we get it up in the data canter.

Brian

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## dizzey

yeah if your only run two servers an ata should be sufficent.

it will be nice to here how it goes  :Smile: 

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## squanto

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  :Wink: 

free hosting, thats nice   :Cool: 

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## BrianW

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

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

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## nmcsween

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.

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## BrianW

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

 *BrianW wrote:*   

> 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.
> ...

 

HECK you could buy both procs and the mobo going dual mp for what you would pay for a HT P4 proc alone with lower performance...

A note on the ECC Memory, It is a waste and it actually slows you down about 10% from what the regular registered memory does.

I have the giga-byte board with dual 2000+'s and it works really well, raid and all.  Last I checked this boards price was around 180 and the procs (2000+'s) were about 120 a piece on newegg.

I would suggest spending your extra cash on a nice antec case with a true power ps (3yr warr).  WHY?  you can get the case/ps for what you would pay for the ps alone.

chris

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## nmcsween

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.

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## MADcow

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?

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## MorphiusFaydal

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

<--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.

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## MorphiusFaydal

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

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.

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## nmcsween

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.

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## ctford0

 *Ultraoctane.com wrote:*   

> <--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.

 

Lets not turn this into an amd vs intel thread, however i thought i would point out...

intel avertises 800 MHz bus however it has many bottlenecks in the design that limits your actual through put.  grant it, it may be better now than a couple of years ago when the p4 first came out.  have you ever wandered why amd calls their processors 3200+ and so on when that isnt the ghz rating?  because that processor compares and normally exceeds the performance of the pentium counterpart of that speed.

ram speeds these days really dont matter as much as it has in the past.  the part of the computer system that is the current bottleneck is the ide performance, so until that improves honestly the rdram support that intel offers is for nothing. just my opinion tho..  

chris

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## BrianW

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

send me one, too

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## squanto

 *BrianW wrote:*   

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

 

WOW!  :Surprised: 

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## MADcow

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

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## nmcsween

The 3 scuzzy drives isn't really a neccesary since a crash will likely never happen you could save yourself about $200 by just going scsi on stripped array. Where the hell did you get money for 3 scsi drives? Is hosting a hl server that profitable...

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## BrianW

Donations from members and pub regulars. We even had one member who was matching other peoples donations for a short time.

Yeah we may just go raid 0 in the end....

Brian

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## BrianW

Ok well the 2u server will not accomodate both a pci video card via a pci riser card, and a scsi controller. So we will need to use the on board ide raid on the mb. We will be going with raid 0. Also simce we now need to buy the drives as well, we are dropping the memory to 1 gb. We will upgrade if necessary. What do you think. I think the raid 0 with two u133 drives will be pretty fast.

Brian

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