Good enough CPU? Intel Xeon E3-1220

[RabidBat]

Would this CPU be good enough for a 20 player dedicated Star Made server?

8gb of DDR3 1066 or 1333

CPU

• LGA1155 socket
  
• # of Cores 4
• # of Threads 4
• Processor Base Frequency 3.10 GHz
• Max Turbo Frequency 3.40 GHz
• Cache 8 MB SmartCache
• Bus Speed 5 GT/s DMI
• TDP 80 W
  
  Circa: 2011

Additional:
120GB SSD

Edit:
This will be for the StarMade Australia server. We want to grow our community and provide the best online Multiplayer experience possible. So we want to get the best bang for our buck stability wise until we can afford better.

 

[Crusade]

What's your budget?

 

[Calhoun]

Well lad, what you have there is basically a sandybridge i5 without an iGPU. Which frankly isn't overly powerful. The main pull of the mainstream Xeons is the ECC RAM support, which the majority of motherboards don't support anyway.

 

[Crusade]

If you have a budget of say, 500-600, I'll be able to pull up some ex servers with dual xeons and 24gb+ ram
So yeah = provide a budget and Cal and I (yes I'm roping you into this Cal) will source something more substantial.

 

[RabidBat]

Yeah not looking at nearly that much price wise and if that's AUD's then yeah no thanks.
Server is located in Australia as we want to have low ping for locals and people in the Australasia region.
We're just looking for advice on what is the minimum hardware for the game that will give a fairly good performance for approx 20 players.
Not looking for hosts/or hardware as such so save the sales pitches lads

 

[Calhoun]

Yeah not looking at nearly that much price wise and if that's AUD's then yeah no thanks.
Server is located in Australia as we want to have low ping for locals and people in the Australasia region.
We're just looking for advice on what is the minimum hardware for the game that will give a fairly good performance for approx 20 players.
Not looking for hosts so save the sales pitches lads

Don't worry, both Cru Cru and I are aussie. And it's not a sales pitch, we'd be recommending hardware, not offering hosting.

 

[nightrune]

Which xeon specifically? You'll want to check support for the simd instructions used for asteroid/terrain generation. Some of the old processors don't have it.

EDIT
I see it in the title. Need to look at support for SSE, but ideally it supports avx512.

 

[BDLS]

For starmade, I want to say you would be better off with something like you listed (lower cores/threads good clockspeed) compared to mega cores and lower clockspeed. When I ran LCB (12 cores) there were always a bunch of useless cores not picking up any load, while individual ones spiked to max load all the time. Not sure if the game has gotten any better with core usage and balanced loading up since those times, plus there's AI and fleets to create more of a burden. Our total CPU usage was always low, but I'm sure those spiking individual cores created issues.

I say give it a shot unless a more modern server owner says otherwise.

 

[OmegaGame]

I am sure if this is the only thing really readily available to you, then it would suffice for a short period of time so long as there aren't more then 10-12 or so people on at a time with its limited threads and limited ram..

I have to say though.. i would like to see someone make a Ryzen server already..

 

[Crusade]

Did a quick search for server hardware.

2 x 6 core Xeon, 72gb ram, with HDDs
IBM x3550 M3 72Gb ( PC3L 10600) 2 x 6-Core Xeon x5650 2.67Ghz RU Server | eBay
AU $549.99

Unsure of instruction sets - however seems like a solid point to get to for lots of players and more efficient segment loading.

 

[nightrune]

The problem with most game servers and real time systems, will be dealing with the main loop time. Starmade makes use of threads when feasible, but many functions are faster even in a base loop due to contention and locking between threads. This makes clock speed very important.

I've observed minecraft servers run poorly on virtual machines due to it's compute heavy load. The time slicing the hypervisor induces can reduce performance if the other os loads are also cpu bound, and not io bound.

Ultimately aim for higher clock speed, run bare metal (if you can) and aim for a moderate amount of ram. Massive ram is useful if you are going to attempt to run from a ram disk but starmade worlds can get large rather quickly.

 

[RabidBat]

We'll be renting the server, and at the moment we have a cheapo '20 player' slot virtual server.
(About 6GB's of ram)

Sometimes it crashes every 5 minutes with 3 players other times it stays up for hours with 9 on.
No access to the console on it unfortunately
(But hey you get what you pay for.)

So I'd have to be guessing the CPU, Ram and being dedicated with this setup we're looking at would have to be a step up regardless yes?

We're on a tight budget atm, so we have to keep it on the cheap. We can get this server for $160 a month,and upgrade as finances allow.

I've been screwing around with a server at home for testing and on an i5 3570k with 8 to 16gb of DDR3 dedicated to it, and the game seems to run okay. Not had a huge amount of players on at once though, but some friends tried their best to crash it and failed lol.

As expected StarMade likes it's ram, but CPU use I noticed was low. Often not going over 5% with the occasional spike when my friends were doing stupid things. With 3 players on we didn't go over 4gb of ram over a few hours of play time and the memory unloaded well back to under 2GB when everyone left.

So surely this kind of server would git r dun?

 

[Zackey_TNT]

Would this CPU be good enough for a 20 player dedicated Star Made server?

8gb of DDR3 1066 or 1333

CPU

• LGA1155 socket
  
• # of Cores 4
• # of Threads 4
• Processor Base Frequency 3.10 GHz
• Max Turbo Frequency 3.40 GHz
• Cache 8 MB SmartCache
• Bus Speed 5 GT/s DMI
• TDP 80 W
  
  Circa: 2011

Additional:
120GB SSD

Edit:
This will be for the StarMade Australia server. We want to grow our community and provide the best online Multiplayer experience possible. So we want to get the best bang for our buck stability wise until we can afford better.

As someone with 2x W5590s, I can assure you that this will run starmade's serverside for a small server. I would however recommend getting a mainstream processor like an intel I5 2600K or something and overclocking it as starmade's serverside mainly doesn't care about other threads/cores, it uses upto 4, usually 2, 2 is about as good as it's going to get for mainstream. Planetgen is done over multiple cores but no one uses planets anyways, so really it's a focus on that single core perf.

And ignore what everyone else says, the memory is very important, as someone who has 8GBs of ram, I can say for sure that just 4 people uses about 4GBs, once you start getting into the two digit numbers, you're looking at 16GB as a minimum.
[doublepost=1496294253,1496294032][/doublepost]

We'll be renting the server, and at the moment we have a cheapo '20 player' slot virtual server.
(About 6GB's of ram)

Sometimes it crashes every 5 minutes with 3 players other times it stays up for hours with 9 on.
No access to the console on it unfortunately
(But hey you get what you pay for.)

So I'd have to be guessing the CPU, Ram and being dedicated with this setup we're looking at would have to be a step up regardless yes?

We're on a tight budget atm, so we have to keep it on the cheap. We can get this server for $160 a month,and upgrade as finances allow.

I've been screwing around with a server at home for testing and on an i5 3570k with 8 to 16gb of DDR3 dedicated to it, and the game seems to run okay. Not had a huge amount of players on at once though, but some friends tried their best to crash it and failed lol.

As expected StarMade likes it's ram, but CPU use I noticed was low. Often not going over 5% with the occasional spike when my friends were doing stupid things. With 3 players on we didn't go over 4gb of ram over a few hours of play time and the memory unloaded well back to under 2GB when everyone left.

So surely this kind of server would git r dun?

You're 100% right, if you have the internet for it, use that I5, because of the low percentage of usage, you want to get those thread requests done as fast as possible, so a high IPC is really important in this case, overclock that I5 and you'll be away, 16GB of ram will do it as well..

Keep in mind that you can pay a company to rack mount a server, which is what I did for a time, if you provide the hardware (rack mount case etc) which is MUCH cheaper then paying for a whole server since you're only paying for the power and internet