Server Setup

[Viper27]

I'm wanting to setup a server to play various games on. I don't know much about setting up servers, though I've built my own computer, so the assembly probably won't be much different.
I'll be sharing the costs with a couple friends, and just got a promotion, so money isn't a problem, but the cost should be kept reasonable.
What do you all recommend for server parts?
I know most people are used to building rigs and not servers, but any advice would be nice.

 

[V00D00]

A few things that are good for servers:
RAID 5 - high performance, with redundancy, but you need at least 3 hard drives. the more drives you use the faster it gets
ECC memory - in the odd event of a memory error you will be alright. NO real server is without ECC memory
Backup Power Units - incase the power goes out or something
High performance CPU - Opeteron / Xeon or the like. Not really necessary, but good for performance. Not sure if it would really help for gaming at all though. You shold be OK with a P4 or Athlon 64

 

[Viper27]

I'll probably just be running one or two games on the server at a time, so multiple processors probably won't be necessary.
I'll probably get a case and throw one or two of these in there for HDD space and RAID support:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16817121405
I'm not really concerned about power loss, because my friends and I just really want this for ourselves.
We'll probably only have a max of 16 people on the server at a time anyways.
Don't know much about ECC memory, but I will research it and it's benefits soon.
Found a site offering 250GB HDDs for $100 shipped each. So they aren't a problem.

 

[Stan]

Servers are just desktops w/o video cards. I've hosted 4*32 player tourneys of counterstrike (half life) on my Dell 1600SC (dual xeon 2.4, 2 gigs ram, scsi primary, ide data).

Theres no real magic to it. If you have never played raid, dont start now.

ECC = more expensive and slow, run it with standard memory.

Its a gaming server.. not mission critical. Buy name brand quality parts like you would for anything else, and your set to go.

 

[bob4432]

the most important item for a game server is connection speed. even a 16player bf2 server needs quite a bit of bandwidth, probabably about 1Mb/s up at least.

basically for your needs, all you need is a old machine and put in a crappy video card - even pci, through in 1GB of ram and you should be good to go.

my "server" is a xp2000 w/ 512MB of ram and all is good, but i am capped on my upload of only 61KB/s.

i do however run about 20websites on it, but ofload the images to a paid hosting, so i am only serving up the html, maybe 20KB max a page

 

[Viditor]

I agree with Stan and bob on their comments...
If there is one "added feature" I would add (only if you feel like really tweaking), it would be to have 2 NICs and load balance them...this will help your network speed a bit.

 

[V00D00]

Load balancing wouldn't do much unless they were playing on a LAN.

Yeah, actually I take back about everything I said. You should be fine with just about any thing. Gaming servers don't really need that much. A bunch of memory is the best thing for a gaming server. I don't think it really needs a lot of hard drive speed.