Processors
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Opteron Quad 64 bit vs Xeon Quad 64 bit

idata
Employee
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My "clan" (close group of friends) is currently looking at purchasing our own server and having it collocated (un-managed hosting) in a data center. We have been renting a Q9300 (2.5 GHz) with 4 GB of ram and have been fairly happy with it. However, we're spending a small fortune each year for the dedicated box. We should be able to cut those costs by 30% in the first 2 years and 50% every year after. I work in I.T. so building, maintaining, and having a box co-lo'ed is no big deal. However, we are trying to be forward thinking and we want to build a box that will last us at least 3 years (5 would be better).

We are willing to spend good money on the box. 1U, 8-16 GB of RAM, Quad or Dual Quad processors, Dual Hot Swap 15k Drives in Raid 1, Windows Server 2003 (maybe 2008), etc. The machine will be capable of running several large game servers at a time.

The big question is... What processor(s)? Do you have or can anyone provide hard numbers comparing modern AMD vs modern Intel processors when used in a server role for gaming? I have looked all over the net and I am really having a difficult time finding good data for high performance gaming servers.

In advance, thanks for your help.

MicroViper

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HERBERT_H_Intel
Employee
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once upon a time, amd had something that gave it a tremendous advantage over intel and that was the memory latency speeds. since they had an integrated memory controller on the cpu, that was quicker. but not with the nehalem processors/systems you can compare apples to apples.

https://www.elnexus.com/articles/Nehalem-2P-Benchmarks.aspx

The Intel 1U and 2U servers SR1600UR and SR2600UR family barebone systems are quite nice in that they have very good upgradability and hardware based remote manageability. The systems support (currently) a total of 96GB of memory (half per processor) use DDR3 memory (both server and desktop memory supported).

It will give you the option to start out with one processor and a few gigs of memory, then in the future you have the option to do a fast upgrade to dual processor and more memory.

as you said, its hard to find numbers for gaming server benchmarks. these usually have to be interpreted from floating point operatings and memory bandwitdth.

OJ

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