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Diggy Hole - A watercooled, overclocked, ITX, 4.2ghz Minecraft server!

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Muel

New Member
Joined
Sep 6, 2015
First post here as I've decided that I'm happy enough with this project to finally share something!

I recently found I was having a problem with my current home server, in that the Minecraft Server application was struggling massively because I build a lot of large redstone machines. Minecraft Server runs the the main world engine thingy in a single thread, which means that it needed a big increase in single thread performance. Not something the 45w AMD Athlon X4 615E in my file server can provide, So I decided to build a separate box just for Minecraft Server.

I raided my spare parts cupboard, and found I had a 128gb Crucial M4 SSD, 4gb of Corsair XMS3 DDR3, some Bitfenix Spectre Pro fans, and a load of watercooling parts. After some deliberation, I decided that - given that single thread performance was key - an Intel Pentium G3258 CPU in a watercooled, overclocked system would be pretty cool, use up all my spares and it wouldn't be too expensive to buy the other parts I needed. I've never built an ITX based system before, so decided this would be a good project to build on that platform seeing as there would be no GPU and only one SSD.

Here's the spec I landed on:

  • CASE: Silverstone Milo ML05B
  • MOBO: Asus H81I-Plus
  • CPU: Intel Pentium G3258 Anniversary Edition - 4.2ghz @ 1.2v
  • RAM: Corsair XMS3 2x2gb 1600mhz DDR3
  • SSD: Crucial M4 120gb
  • PSU: BeQuiet SFX Power 2 300W
  • CPU BLOCK: Phobya UC-2 LT
  • RAD: XSPC AX240
  • FITTINGS: Barrow 16/10
  • PUMPRES: Magicool DCP450

Build was very simple, just chopped a couple of holes in the case for hoses and plugged it all together.

Pics!

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Really happy with it, it seems to have roughly 4/5 times the performance when playing Minecraft than that of the file server it was running on before.
 
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