Hi folks, Even if you cannot give full advice, just some ideas would be great. I am not happy with my rented Valheim server. I now want to build a game server at home - maybe also iTunes, photo streaming, music video serving ... also whatever the next big game will be will maybe get served from it. Budget: £5,000 Main uses of intended build: powerful game server Parts required: case, motherboard, CPU, GPU (...or CPU/GPU integrated for a server?), RAM, SSD (preferably as fast as NVMe). Previous build information (list details of parts): N/A Monitor resolution: N/A Storage requirements: not less than 1TB Will you be overclocking: No. Any motherboard requirements (no. of USB, Xfire/SLI, fan headers): ideally USB-C for quick file transfers Extra information about desired system: The box will be connected to a gigabit fibre home broadband. I don't want a blade type of server thingy - I also don't want a huge box, so I'm wondering if I can build a beastly type of game server in a small'er form factor, without the small'ness being limiting. The box will be stored in a cool utility cupboard so I'm wondering if I could add a really small screen, and a shelf with 10key'less keyboard and a roller ball mouse for maintenance - I'm not keen on the idea of VNC, remote access type of stuff ... because I don't know much about it and worry about security. I have tried to find what I'm looking for, but I'm not sure it exists as a pre-built solution. I found plenty of PC's, but not server type. Again - it's a lot to ask someone to input their time into this - even if you can just point me in a direction to take - that would be much appreciated.
By a blade sercer do you mean a rack mount chassis? And what aren't you happy about your rented server? Also when you say no limits do you mean £1k, £10k, £100k?
Good points! I was a bit naive when I said no limits. I saw Linus on LTT talking about a $50k server. Limit now set to £5k. Yes when I say blade, I'm thinking of 1U rack mounted ... I don't want that because I can't just stick it in a corner. The Valheim server is not dedicated, AFAIK it's on a box with other hosted games. I don't want that and we're getting lag. When we're gaming on it I want my server to be there with every ounce of juice it needs.
I'm looking at this atm - looks promising so far and configurable: Dell PowerEdge T640 Tower Server : Servers | Dell UK
TBH, you don't need a server, it'll have 85% of the features you won't know how to or nbe bothered to use. Go for a Ryzen PC, you can drop in ECC RAM if you want to be fancy, it'll do everything that does for way less cost and complexity, plus then you're not locked into a Dell system. We do it all the time at work, we only use a server OS and hardware if we really have to. Edit: actually thinking about it, you'll want an Intel CPU as they have intigrated GPU's while Ryzen ones don't. You'll lose ECC RAM but you won't notice. Something like this would be my suggestion. Configure the HDD's in RAID 5 for redundency, set the SSD to back up to that array and away you go. 550W is overkill, its more that you know its going to stay nice and cool and stable.
What is your home internet Download and upload speeds, as if they are not great you could still have issues. Do you have a static ip on your broadband line?
This! Buy a significantly cheaper standard consumer based Intel system, or AMD system and shove in any old graphics card. You'll save a load of money, lose no discernible performance, and don't have to contend with anything proprietary that might crop up in a proper server.
Most game servers don't need much resources to be honest so you could build something in a small box with big cpu and memory, but you might not need much, I used to run a couple of game servers from pretty woeful hardware serving a LAN Gaming site, never any issues, these days so many cheap fast cores available and memory is cheap. You could keep build quite modest, I just built a server with a Ryzen 4c/8t Zen2 CPU it is happily doing NAS duties, a few game servers and a couple of VMs for other duties, it is stacked full of disks. typically low use it is using 25w, fully loaded CPUs doing disk stuff 90w. all quite manageable in a little itx box. in fact with all the things I have running on it I am barely loading its CPU or RAM, I can only see those loads when stress testing my passive cooling setup with prime95 etc. How many servers do you want to run and what resources do the games you want to host take. I built my AMD server with a server board, there are negatives to this, it cost more, it has an unfriendly bios and limited memory on qvl list but the positives are you don't need a GPU as it has one on the motherboard, you can remote into your server very easy in a web browser on main machine to monitor all of its sensors, do bios updates etc on its IPMI interface which is a separate system on the motherboard to do this it's quite a nice feature. it also has 4 LAN interfaces (+1 for IPMI), 8 SATA and a couple of NVMe slots before you even use the PCI slots, so quite handy. Even with the pricey motherboard and ram machine was under 700quid for everything minus disks, you'd half that with a consumer board and normal ram unless you wanted more cores/ram, I only used 32Gb, my biggest spend was disks at more than double that as I don't do spinners anymore. If you want a proper beast then a wrx80 threadripper pro setup could be built in budget but would be nuts.
I love all this advice and I’m going from ‘must have beast game server’ to a more reasonable ‘keep calm, baby steps, learn something’. I’m now thinking about a micro ATX sized case with an AMD multi core processor (although everything I like the look of seems to be out of stock). A cheap GFX card. A nice chunky air cooler for the CPU rather.
I know you said you didn't want to remote into it but it sounds like it might be the ideal thing for you and a similar server board to myself considering you are locking it away in a server room, remote access is very handy and secure, the remote access interface is a separate system onboard that allows you to monitor and control the server, it gives you an internal website you access on your lan where you can do all the power control and monitoring as well as use your Keyboard video and mouse on the system and don't have to worry about ancilliaries to run your server,it really is quite convenient. I picked the ASRock X570M X570D4U-2L2T microatx as I wanted a couple of 10Gb NICs but there is a cheaper one with normal GB lan the ASRock X570M X570D4U and even an itx version if you want to go smaller, you can fit anything from ryzen 3 to ryzen 9, so 8 to 32 threads worth a look.
