Looking to build a game server...

[Bobby Manus]

I was just wondering what you guys recomend to host a game server??? As far as I know you need a good harddrive/drives, fast processor, and lot of ram... I would love some recomendations on parts, I'm thinking of getting a 10000rpm scsi Seagate Cheetah, maybe 2 depending on my cash... Im looking for around 500$ here. I alrady have an old voodoo 3 that I can use, and I have an extra network card to. You guys have any mobos in mine that are cheap and stable??? I am not going to overclock this thing becuase its literilly going to be on 24/7, and it would probably get burnt out pretty fast. I was looking at getting an A7V, there pretty cheap and everyone raves about em. Are they hard to set up? Do you have to screw with a lot of jumpers or anything? I was not able to get my kt7a raid working, still pretty new with jumpers. Also, I'm kind of scared with the idea of setting up a raid setup... Ive never read about it except that its a lot faster running raid 0... Also whats a good raid card and scsi card that I can get for cheap??? Thanks for all your help guys...

 

[supraway]

Depends on the game, how many users, and what your bandwidth is like. If I were you, I would buy an Abit KT7A motherboard, and buy 2 15gb IBM 75GXP hard drives in a striped configuration. That would be your best and cheapest bet for incredible hard drive speed. The only advantage you would get with that Seagate drive would be faster seek times, but if you keep your drives defragmented and clean, you won't have a problem. The IBM drives have a higher sustained data transfer rate, and if you had them striped, you will nearly double your speeds. I would go an Athlon 1ghz, as they are cheap right now, and with you having everything else, that would end up about $500. Oh yes, make sure you buy a decent network card, although it may seem unimportant, that is the most vital component in this system. I recommend 3COM.

 

[Bobby Manus]

It will be very well defragmented 100% of the time as it wont be on windows, red hat linux 7. Windows is messy so u have to defrag to pic up after it, but linux is much cleaner in that sense. So then what ur saying about the deskstars makes good sense. As for the network card, i have a spare network card, its a netgear 10/100mbps nic, which is more then enough. Its getting hooked up to a 1mb sdsl line, and I plan to host as many players as possible. 1mb can host 20 with no problems is what ive heard, this is for counter strike btw. I'm probably going to stay away from the abit just becuase I was unable to get my last one to work, but that was probably me being a stupid newb and not seting all my jumpers right. I took it to a computer store and he had to fiddle with it for hours to get it to finnally boot, and whenit did there were serius incompatibilites. BTW do u guys suggest DDR for a server??? I dunno if it would help it much what do you guys think. Thanks for the help, o and 1 last question, whats the diff between asus a7a133a and a7a133-E or something like that??? Thanks for your input!!