Server dualie advice

[stultus]

Trying to build a game server to host a couple games. Games aren't SMP-threaded, it's just a simple matter of cramming 2 CPUs in the box to maximize number of processes. What's the best route for this sort of thing? Dual Xeon?

 

[BW86]

dual opteron

 

[stultus]

Why is this better than a dual 3ghz xeon? I just need some benches to look at.

 

[RadiclDreamer]

Dual Intel, Proven reliability. Keyword being PROVEN, I may go with AMD down the road, but when things have go to work and work right its Intel for me

 

[uOpt]

Actually that's quite an interesting question. We know the Athlon 64 blows away the Pentiums in full game mode with graphics.

But what happens if you only run the server? Is that CPU-limited in first place?

Very interesting question indeed. I suggest you get both, test them and report back

 

[imported_michaelpatrick33]

Originally posted by: RadiclDreamer
Dual Intel, Proven reliability. Keyword being PROVEN, I may go with AMD down the road, but when things have go to work and work right its Intel for me

Uhhh, yeah ok. The Opteron's are being used by all the big fortune 500 companies, the government, Universities, and on and on and on and on. It is getting old, the brainwashed people spouting about AMD being less reliable now a days with their Opteron line. It is just crap. I own both Intel and AMD products and like both products so I am not a fanboy but your ideas and perceptions are about three years to late. I would get dual Opterons for game server due to hypertransport and very low latency due to on-die memory controller as well making sure I get SCSI drives due to their better server performance.

The Opteron's are not being sold by Sun, IBM, HP, Cray (only Dell [Intel's soulmate] is missing because they aren't working right. These companies aren't in the business of selling unproven or unreliable products for years at a time. Intel Xeon's would be a fine way to go to but I personally believe the Opterons are a better choice at this point.

 

[RadiclDreamer]

Better take out a LARGE loan if he thinks hes gonna get both. Hell, prob gonna need a loan just for one dual machine

 

[stultus]

I see a lot of talk but no benchmarks. I want data

 

[Mik3y]

Originally posted by: RadiclDreamer
Dual Intel, Proven reliability. Keyword being PROVEN, I may go with AMD down the road, but when things have go to work and work right its Intel for me

that's BS. amd wins in the server and dually market. they are superior to intel's xeon, and even when the new xeon's came out, guess who's still on top? the opterons of course.

you can check out benchies from anandtech and other places and you'll see. i'll still take a xeon any day, but if its a xeon vs an opteron, the opteron wins.

 

[RadiclDreamer]

You guys really need to learn to read, I said the only reason Im not going with AMD is because INTEL has PROVEN their reliability over the many YEARS they have been doing server enviroments. AMD may well prove to be even better than intel, but I will give it a few years before I trust the integrity of my servers to a relatively new player in the server arena

 

[Mik3y]

Here's the benchy you're looking for. These are the latest and greatest dually cpu's, so if you're looking for an older xeon perhaps, the opterons KILL it. the new xeons seen in the benchmark are very close to the opterons, but are waay different from the older models. the new and revised xeons came out months later then amd's opteron 250's, but still trail the 250's in overall performance. this just proves how intel can lag behind even after new revisions and new technology vs amd's old socket 940 and etc.

 

[uOpt]

Originally posted by: stultus
I see a lot of talk but no benchmarks. I want data

In all seriousness, the thing you need to figure out is whether your are CPU-bound to start from.

You woud need to run a decent performance monitor on an existing big gameserver to see how much CPU is being used, how much memory is shuffled around and how much the PCI bus and/or Ethernet card is being pushed.

Now, I don't think that running the standard gameservers is neccesarily CPU-limited, and the reason is that these games are designed to run the graphics engine in addition to the AI and the player. If you run without the AI and without graphics but with more players then it is entirely up to the game.

Or in short: the CPU might acually yawn all the time anyway and could handle several servers at once.

Do you have access to Linux-running game server and can follow the output of top(1) for a while? That'll tell you quite a bit.

Even if you verify that you need more CPU power, then it is still the question whether the kind of CPU used is some that Intel does fast or AMD64 does fast. It is a pretty safe guess that AMD will wipe the floor with Pentium-4s even when you run games without the graphics, but certain it is not.

 

[Mik3y]

Originally posted by: RadiclDreamer
You guys really need to learn to read, I said the only reason Im not going with AMD is because INTEL has PROVEN their reliability over the many YEARS they have been doing server enviroments. AMD may well prove to be even better than intel, but I will give it a few years before I trust the integrity of my servers to a relatively new player in the server arena

and where's the proof that intel's "proven their reliability"? i'm not trying to bash you, but i'm just wondering how you see intel has proven has their reliability and amd hasnt.

 

[stultus]

Thanks for the benchmark link.

The game in question is Tribes Vengeance. It's a whore. You basically need a dedicated P4 3 GHz to run a single server.

My only data so far is with task manager. On a P4 3.2 (no HT) it takes 70-80% CPU. With HT, I can run two servers and they only occasionally peg the CPU at 100% (and people report no problems playing --- I know, that's just what people report).

An XP2500 seems to handle this fine (80-90% CPU).

 

[RadiclDreamer]

I've used servers for approx the last 10 years and aside from hard disk crashes I've had super reliability. So I should maybe rephrase and say they have proven their reliability to ME over the years. Give it some and maybe AMD will do the same. But I would hate to have a server crash and then my boss try to blame me for using something that didnt have a long term history of being reliable. At least with the Intel I have the excuse that it is the industry standard and has proven reliability.

For the most part my bosses could care less what works faster, they just want something that has proven its self to be stable and reliable

 

[stultus]

Hey, take your flamewar into another thread, please.

 

[uOpt]

Originally posted by: stultus
Thanks for the benchmark link.

The game in question is Tribes Vengeance. It's a whore. You basically need a dedicated P4 3 GHz to run a single server.

My only data so far is with task manager. On a P4 3.2 (no HT) it takes 70-80% CPU. With HT, I can run two servers and they only occasionally peg the CPU at 100% (and people report no problems playing --- I know, that's just what people report).

An XP2500 seems to handle this fine (80-90% CPU).

Interesting.

But you see if your XP2500 is only 20% slower than the 3.2Ghz P4 it is pretty obvious that this is code that runs better on AMD (says the old Intel fanboy).

So a single highend Athlon 64 will probably beat a dual Xeon, and a dual Opteron will rock. On top of that keep in mind that the Prescott is probably even worse.

BTW, if you check out prices for SMP system, you can get pretty up-to-date CPUs for dual-rocessor systems and dual-processor system at prices that might be worth the fun. Opteron 242 and Xeon 2.8 sell around $200 and Mainboards for $250-$350, even good ones with 64-bit PCI slots and AGP (you want AGP just in case, do you )?

Martin

 

[Markfw]

Originally posted by: stultus
Thanks for the benchmark link.

The game in question is Tribes Vengeance. It's a whore. You basically need a dedicated P4 3 GHz to run a single server.

My only data so far is with task manager. On a P4 3.2 (no HT) it takes 70-80% CPU. With HT, I can run two servers and they only occasionally peg the CPU at 100% (and people report no problems playing --- I know, that's just what people report).

An XP2500 seems to handle this fine (80-90% CPU).

I would try some benches for you if you need. So far nothing has stopped or slowed down this baby. What do you want me to run ?
Edit: and ignore RadiclDreamer, I figured out after about 3 threads thats he is a flaming Intel Fanboy

 

[TerryMathews]

Originally posted by: RadiclDreamer
Dual Intel, Proven reliability. Keyword being PROVEN, I may go with AMD down the road, but when things have go to work and work right its Intel for me

Meh, fanboi-ism at it's worst. There are bulletproof, rock-solid motherboards for AMD-based computers just like there are unstable, buggy motherboards for Intel-based computers. Anyone who knows anything about PCs today knows that it's not the CPU, it's not even the chipset, it's the build quality of the board it's attached to.

 

[Adn4n]

I've hosted Tribes Vengeance, Doom 3, and other on my Athlon 64 3200+ 1MBL2. I got perfect performance as did my lan buddies, and my system wasn't even dedicated. How can you say that Intel is the industry standard, when the majority of the fortune 500 companies use AMD? You see, we here have a difficulty telling people how to optimize a system based on lesser, weaker, or slower technology.

Ch33rs

 

[TerryMathews]

Originally posted by: Markfw900

Originally posted by: stultus
Thanks for the benchmark link.

The game in question is Tribes Vengeance. It's a whore. You basically need a dedicated P4 3 GHz to run a single server.

My only data so far is with task manager. On a P4 3.2 (no HT) it takes 70-80% CPU. With HT, I can run two servers and they only occasionally peg the CPU at 100% (and people report no problems playing --- I know, that's just what people report).

An XP2500 seems to handle this fine (80-90% CPU).

I would try some benches for you if you need. So far nothing has stopped or slowed down this baby. What do you want me to run ?

I'll run the same benches for comparison, I'm running a PC-DL (i875), with a pair of 2.8/200 Xeons (OCed from 1.6LV), and dual channel 400MHz RAM.

Let me be crystal clear here - I in no way prefer Intel. I just bought this because it was insanely cheap.

 

[Markfw]

Originally posted by: TerryMathews

Originally posted by: Markfw900

Originally posted by: stultus
Thanks for the benchmark link.

The game in question is Tribes Vengeance. It's a whore. You basically need a dedicated P4 3 GHz to run a single server.

My only data so far is with task manager. On a P4 3.2 (no HT) it takes 70-80% CPU. With HT, I can run two servers and they only occasionally peg the CPU at 100% (and people report no problems playing --- I know, that's just what people report).

An XP2500 seems to handle this fine (80-90% CPU).

I would try some benches for you if you need. So far nothing has stopped or slowed down this baby. What do you want me to run ?

I'll run the same benches for comparison, I'm running a PC-DL (i875), with a pair of 2.8/200 Xeons (OCed from 1.6LV), and dual channel 400MHz RAM.

Let me be crystal clear here - I in no way prefer Intel. I just bought this because it was insanely cheap.

Now thats what I like to hear ! Objective thought ! Anyway, The Anand benches would have me wiping the floor with yours, but I don't care ! I really like to hear good compitition, an no fanboyism ! Thanks for your post, and I look forward to some fun !

 

[nick1985]

Originally posted by: RadiclDreamer
Dual Intel, Proven reliability. Keyword being PROVEN, I may go with AMD down the road, but when things have go to work and work right its Intel for me

thats why anandtech uses opterons for its servers right?

server CPU benchies

 

[Markfw]

Originally posted by: nick1985

Originally posted by: RadiclDreamer
Dual Intel, Proven reliability. Keyword being PROVEN, I may go with AMD down the road, but when things have go to work and work right its Intel for me

thats why anandtech uses opterons for its servers right?

server CPU benchies

:laugh:

 

[TerryMathews]

Originally posted by: Markfw900
Now thats what I like to hear ! Objective thought ! Anyway, The Anand benches would have me wiping the floor with yours, but I don't care ! I really like to hear good compitition, an no fanboyism ! Thanks for your post, and I look forward to some fun !

Oh, there are no doubts in my mind that your rig would kill mine on pure performance. But divide your performance by what you paid for it and do the same with mine, and I'll hand you your ass. I'll put it this way:

$129 pair of HyperX 3200 512MB DIMMs
$188 Asus PC-DL
$119 pair of Intel Xeon 1.6LVs
-------
$436, which is about 2/3s the price of one Opteron 248...

If mine even gets close, I kill you.