Spec me a Minecraft Server

haaammit

haaammit

haaammit

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Allo - I currently rent an MC server (From Bisect fwiw) and the specs are *Intel Xeon Processors with clock speeds of 3.4 GHz (3.7 GHz turbo) or faster + DDR4 RAM on all our nodes*

This is costing about £12 p/m for their 4Gb Ram option. I was idly wondering about how much it would cost to spec up a machine to replace this. Not looking to save money as such, but if a home build machine would give better bang for buck then that's always nice. Would need to factor in electricity costs too, but I'm sure it wouldn't be a huge amount.

I run maybe 8 plugins. Worlds usually end up being quite large. Not adverse to using a Linux OS. Smaller form factor would be nice, but not if it comes at a price premium. Would only need Case/Mobo/CPU/RAM/CPU/SSD. More than happy to buy used. What kind of money/specs am I looking at?

Cheers
 
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I could I guess, but wouldn't that get impacted if I'm playing another game? Specs are 5600X & 32gigs Ram
The MC server would need to run 24/7
Cheers
 
Pretty much anything. Low powered Xeon E-3 with 16gb of RAM and Intel pro NIC in some flavour of ATX.

Add whistles and bells as required. 3.5 bay or two for backups. Gold/plat rated PSU for lower costs.
 
How many players? Unless there's a lot of you, you don't need anything particularly meaty, I run a couple of games servers on a Lenovo Tiny m73 with a 4170t and 8gb ram (a more recent version will be even better).

Pretty low powered (iirc something like 60w, so what's that, 2p/hour?)
Small enough to fit out of the way on a shelf or in a (well ventilated!) cupboard

They come up pretty often as refurbs on the usual places from office clearances, looks like about £150ish for a decent example

We've only had 6 players max, but the following games have had no problems at all:

Minecraft
The forest
Sons of the forest
Ark
Factorio
Don't starve together
7 days to die
 
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Hmm - some food for thought here. At 2p per hour, that's actually going to cost me more in electricity than what I pay already! I'll have a look at some of the above options. Cheers :)
 
haaammit said:
Hmm - some food for thought here. At 2p per hour, that's actually going to cost me more in electricity than what I pay already! I'll have a look at some of the above options. Cheers :)
Click to expand...
If you buy something new it won't be 2p per hour, at least most of the time. Hosting an enshrouded server on an i5 1340p I normally only see up to 15% load, so only loading on a couple of boosted cores while the majority are idle, even combining with other game servers and several other vm's it's only 15-50% when certain machines are doing lots of work. Depending on the config, this little box is 25 - 65w, 65w being the maximum boost power which it doesn't maintain for long. And when idle/very low load, which is most of the time, it'll be more like 1-10w.

You hold also get a lower power chip if it's only for one server and nothing else.

You are correct though, to replace one game server you are renting, you are unlikely to save enough money to make it worth it. The efficiency comes from multi use of the box, just as it does in the server farms you rent space in.
 
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I have been looking into something similar, but more of a family based server (somewhere to store media/ run a family modded minecraft server) and it has suprised me at how low a spec set up i actually needed.
 
haaammit said:
Hmm - some food for thought here. At 2p per hour, that's actually going to cost me more in electricity than what I pay already! I'll have a look at some of the above options. Cheers :)
Click to expand...

If you want really low power use then something like a 5350GE and A520 board is the way to go. You can run these passive with a little effort.
 
How about something along the lines of a Ryzen 5 3600 based system? I also have a ThinkCentre i5-4570T that is being used as a Plex server - would a system like that run both happily enough so I could retire the ThinkCentre maybe? Probably with 16Gb ram.
Cheers
 
A r5 3600 will not run plex well. It'll encode a little fine, but you really want to be using something with an igpu, unless you stick a gpu in the system for encoding. This is why celerons are often recommend, since the igpu does all the work.

Unless of course you're not transcoding anything and everything is served directly, then it doesn't matter what you use, as its doing basically nothing.
 
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