Dual Operton X2 vs. Dual Xeon X2

[FireWater]

I am building a server for the sole purpose of hosting games and teamspeak. Which proccessors would be better to include in my box?

Thanks a lot!

 

[shinigamiX]

Xeons but BE SURE THAT THEY ARE WOODCREST XEONS! Otherwise you will end up with some NetBurst heating your poor server.

 

[mesarectifier]

Woodcrest Xeons are better than all the Opterons. Like shinigami says, make damn sure you don't get any NetBurst CPUs.

 

[FireWater]

Ok great, Lets say I get Dual 5100s.

Assuming 4 GB of RAM, how many Half Life 2 source based servers do you think I could run off the one box.

Also I need a good place to co locate the box on a very fast line at an affordable price. Any suggestions?

 

[Doughbuy]

Verizon FIOS if you can get it... the best hi-speed internet service available right now (not sure how the buisness version of it is, don't know how many static IP addresses you need either... but check it out)

 

[MU_Engineer]

From what I have read, the FB-DIMMs are not all that bad (well, except for being hot, and expensive) if you have only one module on each channel- 4 modules in all. Less than four and you do not get all of the memory channels filled, which sacks performance. If you have more than 4 FB-DIMMs in your system, then the RAMBUS-serial-interface-like nature of the architecture starts to rear its ugly head as the second FB-DIMM in each channel has to send all of its I/O requests through the first FB-DIMM in the channel.

My verdict: Woodcrest Xeons are very good CPUs, but they're hampered by a not-so-hot memory technology. I'd wait for the non-FB-DIMM chipset that Intel is supposed to roll out later.

 

[BaronMatrix]

I am building a server for the sole purpose of hosting games and teamspeak. Which proccessors would be better to include in my box?

Thanks a lot!

If you consider that Blizzard uses Opteron for WoW, then that gives you a real world example. If you are doing transaction-based (has to happen now over and over again) processing Opteron is the clear winner even over Woodcrest.

Google also uses Opteron as do Yahoo! and MS.

Most games do't use SSE to my knowledge and FP is the Opteron's strong point. Both companies have new chips coming out next year but I don't think the mobo will remain the same for Intel (new chipset) while Opteron will get a 4 core drop in for Socket F.

I have yet to see a real world game server bench though so, it's really a matter of preference and/or price. FB-DIMMS may make a larger price difference.

They will both do the job.

 

[mesarectifier]

If you consider that Blizzard uses Opteron for WoW, then that gives you a real world example. If you are doing transaction-based (has to happen now over and over again) processing Opteron is the clear winner even over Woodcrest.

Those servers would surely have been built before Woodcrest was released, rendering the example irrellevant.

 

[quantumsheep]

If you consider that Blizzard uses Opteron for WoW, then that gives you a real world example. If you are doing transaction-based (has to happen now over and over again) processing Opteron is the clear winner even over Woodcrest.

Those servers would surely have been built before Woodcrest was released, rendering the example irrellevant.

Ahh that reminds me of critical thinking lessons...

 

[WR]

Ok great, Lets say I get Dual 5100s.

Assuming 4 GB of RAM, how many Half Life 2 source based servers do you think I could run off the one box.

Consider that a single 3GHz Pentium4 (Northwood, not dual-core) can easily handle 50+ concurrent HL2 CS players. That's roughly the processing power in one 1.5GHz Woodcrest or 2GHz Opteron core. A modern dual-core CPU doesn't bottleneck easily with game servers. You'll probably run first into issues with the amount of RAM and network capacity.

There is a little article about configuring hardware for Counterstrike - http://www.cstrike-planet.com/tutorial/1. Basically, you should plan for 6KBps (48kbps) upload bandwidth and 48-64MB RAM per player served. Note that the article was written at a time when the only way to get two cores was to use two Xeon P4's or Opterons.

If I were you, I'd just purchase a Conroe E6600, 4GB of ECC RAM (preferably unbuffered), a 10K rpm SATA drive, and a 975X board (to support ECC on socket 775). That should work smoothly for 64 players, limited by RAM and presuming you have a network connection with 3mbit/s peak upload capacity. Additionally, you'd need an operating system other than WinXP 32-bit, which is limited to 3GB of RAM. The processor is already overkill, if you noticed, but that is simply to allow room for future games and/or communication and administrative background processes.