CPU (and general build advice) for Windows Server in SOHO Environment

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notneps

notneps

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Sep 5, 2014
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My home office has outgrown one of the machines it uses for a server, so thinking of building a new one. Roles the machine would fill are:

*Fileserver/Media server (no transcoding, just straight up playing the files on other machines)
*Seedbox
*Hypervisor (nothing heavy just tiny VMs that run fine on an ancient laptop at the moment)
*Webhost (non mission-critical, very small and very low traffic websites, south of 1GB/month)

Our network has only 4 users on it, and three of them will almost never do anything other than stream media.

I was thinking of building on an H81 or H97 board with one the LGA 1150 Pentiums, G3260 probably. But I was wondering if it would be better to go with an i3 or even i5? Or would that be too much? Would more memory affect performance? Or would 4GB be enough? Also, would it be worth it building with a Skylake CPU? While DDR4 platforms have grown cheaper they're still more expensive at the moment, so if it offers no tangible benefits for me I'd rather stick to DDR3.

Other info:
*The machine will be on 24/7
*Will be running Windows Server 2012 R2
*It'll run headless most of the time
*Plan on fitting as many 3TB WD Green drives as whatever motherboard I go with allows.
 
Solution
geofelt
Some thoughts:

1. If a G3260 would do the job, a similarly priced G3258 would be much better. It can be overclocked perhaps 25-30% with little effort.
That said, with possibly lots of tasks, I think a I3 of some flavor would be better.
Skylake processors available are still in the upper($200) price tiers.
If that is not an issue, then I really think a forward looking build should be Skylake.
If your VM hypervisor requires special instruction sets, double check that it is available on your new cpu. Cheaper units may omit such special instructions.

2. More ram is always good, particularly when multitasking.
I would think a 8gb kit of 2 x 4gb would be about right.

3. The motherboard and chipset will determine the number of sata...
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geofelt

geofelt

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Oct 9, 2006
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Some thoughts:

1. If a G3260 would do the job, a similarly priced G3258 would be much better. It can be overclocked perhaps 25-30% with little effort.
That said, with possibly lots of tasks, I think a I3 of some flavor would be better.
Skylake processors available are still in the upper($200) price tiers.
If that is not an issue, then I really think a forward looking build should be Skylake.
If your VM hypervisor requires special instruction sets, double check that it is available on your new cpu. Cheaper units may omit such special instructions.

2. More ram is always good, particularly when multitasking.
I would think a 8gb kit of 2 x 4gb would be about right.

3. The motherboard and chipset will determine the number of sata ports available.
But... you can always add additional sata adapter cards if you have sufficient pcie slots on the motherboard.
This may well be a good reason to go with Skylake and a Z170 which has more pcie lanes available.

 
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blazorthon

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Sep 24, 2010
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If he really wants more chipset SATA ports, then he should go to a Z97, not 170. There's no need to jump up to more expensive memory and a $200+ i5 or i7 when an LGA 1150 i3 would already be overkill.

If the VMs are "tiny" and run on an "ancient" laptop, then he doesn't need any special instructions that an i3 or worse might not have. Speaking from experience here. The old laptop would already be weaker and not have them anyway. 2GB of RAM would also probably be enough, but with it being so cheap, there's no reason not to go for 2x4GB and use some of the extra for caching or what not.

If a server is under a few hundred users, then you don't need much more than an Atom for a CPU. A Pentium or Celeron should be plenty, especially if its headless. Server 2012 R2 core uses almost no resources at all. I have a datacenter copy with the GUI and it idles at .4GB used out of 8GB of RAM and only 5.2GB of storage space for Windows x64. The things Dreamspark has for free can be wonderful, even more so after a treatment of the free version of NTLite and then Winreducer 8.1 xD
 
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