Looking For Server Recommendation


nikkinrob

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Hello Everyone,

Looking for some recommendations from the community.
I currently have an HP Proliant DL380 G7 with 2x X5550 Xeon processors with 32GB Ram.

I feel its time to retire this machine (Dont mind utilizing the ram in a new machine)

So im in market for something new (I like the rackmount style)
My budget is around 400-600$
What i would want to use is a few gaming servers (General steam based like Ark survival, Conan, atlas ext.. ext.... as well as minecraft servers) I know i have had a few ark servers running at once and minecraft
But what i imagine doing is all these gaming servers plus id like to utilize NAS funcationality to run probably NEXTCLOUD to utilize for a backup solution for my computers + iphones
I also would like to run a plex server for personal media files (Music, videos) but nothing 4k related.
I also feel like i should migrate my raspberry pihole onto this machine as well and use pihole here and utilize the raspberry pi for something else.

I was looking at Dells and other HPs with dual E5-2650v2 with more ram than i currently have, but does anyone have any other recommendations or specific recommendations? My ultimate goal is to be able to handle all of this and have a better overall machine that will last me 3-5 years before my next retirement phase.

Thank you in advanced.

Also wanted to add. Im considering just doing 4 - 6 drives in total (Maybe add more in future) but ultimately i was thinking on setting up Main Drive (To hold the OSes and such, any virtualization ext...) on a Mirror aspect (Not sure if this is best, never really did RAID items before) and then have a 2nd set of drives prob 2x 4TB to do the nextcloud on for my backups in a mirror setup) then i possibly may want to do another set of possibly 2 500gb SSDs to hold the game server files in a mirror setup (And suggestions or feedback in this topic of raid would be appreciated as well.
so Pair 1 = OS
Pair 2=NextCloud
Pair 3=Game Servers

Edited by nikkinrob
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about 2 months ago I bought a z440 from this place: https://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-Z440-Workstation-M1H93UC-ABA-Desktop-PC-Xeon-E5-1650-V3-3-5GHz-32GB-SEE-NOTES/372888072889?hash=item56d1dc72b9:g:wy0AAOSwrxpeJcMc:sc:FedExHomeDelivery!30127!US!-1

 

I actually lowballed and they countered, we ended up around 250

 

12 cores with ok clock speed (passmark is 13k vs your current 8k setup.) currently runs 2 vms at the same time (one of them games on a rx 590 hitting over 100fps on fortnite) and also serves as a backup destination for network time machine and vpn service via wireguard. but not a ton of space for spinning disk. You'd have to look into getting an enclosure for the top 5.25 cd space.

 

not rack mount but mountable.

 

with the extra money you could buy more ram if you wanted plus a cheap gtx 710 for Nvidia transcodes to offload the work from the cpu.

 

 

Edited by 1812
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Thank you for the response, but i feel like i am looking for something with a bit more power. i have been also looking into e5-2690v2... i know i have my heart set on 128GB ram, any other suggestions anyone else may have? i know i may need to raise my budget slightly to more the 600-900 range... but like i stated i love running gaming servers(Not actual gaming on) which the x5550 has handled just fine. but i want more power out of this machine since i want to also NAS with it for a backup solution and plex. I just dont want to have to upgrade for at least 4-5 years. I am open to DIY if pointed in right direction and if cost factors fall inline.

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6 hours ago, nikkinrob said:

Thank you for the response, but i feel like i am looking for something with a bit more power. i have been also looking into e5-2690v2... i know i have my heart set on 128GB ram, any other suggestions anyone else may have? i know i may need to raise my budget slightly to more the 600-900 range... but like i stated i love running gaming servers(Not actual gaming on) which the x5550 has handled just fine. but i want more power out of this machine since i want to also NAS with it for a backup solution and plex. I just dont want to have to upgrade for at least 4-5 years. I am open to DIY if pointed in right direction and if cost factors fall inline.

what you way you want conflicts with what you say you need. if your current level of cpu handles all the gaming servers, and you added 39% more power with the outlined proc above, you'd have WAY more than you need already. And justifying more cpu power for plex is negated by using a more efficient GPU for transcoding. On my primary server, using a E3-1220 v5 (passmark 7768) it runs a vm with firewall, NAS storage, could berry (2 instances) for encrypted backup, plex with GPU transcoding, mine0s hosting few worlds, next cloud/mariadb/duckdns/letsencrypt, zero tier, wireguard, 10GB networking pushing and pulling over 500MB/s, and a few other things. And it never struggles.

 

I use to have a quad socket 580G7 with 80 threads, but this newer one kills it in terms of efficiency and actually runs smoother. 

 

Point being, if you're dead set on having "all the cores" then go for it. But I don't think you really need them. And on the subject of Ram, yeah, max that out IF you have a need for it. Otherwise, its again a waste. I'm not saying buy the workstation I outlined, I'm saying understand the need, and where you're going to grow in the next few years. Because right now, your use case and wish list don't line up.

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how many game servers are you running (like total instances)? for comparison, with a couple users, my single mineos consumes about 20-30% of one core depending on activity levels. What utilization are you seeing on your current setup when running game servers?

 

also, when using plex and transcoding with a low end Nvidia gpu, it adds another 15-20% to a single core (vs all of any cores assigned when CPU transcoding), just to note.

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i like to run about 3ish Minecraft servers usually (Usually a lot more ram intensive than CPU)
then as far other games
Ark (Up to 6 at once) Usually if i do this im done with more servers with my current setup as it gets maxed out pretty quickly depending on how many players are connected.
but i envision maybe running up to 5-7 more steam related game servers on top of minecraft and ark (Potentially i could want to do more if i do an Atlas server, but id prob reduce other servers before i did this)

Plex again is a lower priority since its mostly old family videos and some other digitized movie collections in 1080p format

And then the fact i want to run a NAS setup (NextCloud and Duplicati) which will require a few other dockers to work of course

And thought about moving my pi-hole from my raspberry pi to this machine instead as well although i dont have to

 

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Are you thinking about single or dual E5-2667v2? A single cpu is essentially double the passmark score of your current config. You'll have to consider how you would provision them, either per core assignments, or over provisioning them on top of each other. Maybe a dual socket board using one socket only to start and see how that goes?

 

I never had much cpu usage with next cloud, but duplicate always seemed to eat more cpu than I thought it was worth, especially when using encryption. Pi-hole is pretty light on cpu needs.

 

 

 

 

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