PCA Forums

I want to build a server for some friends to play Medal Of Honor on . What are the basic mininums for as cpu , ram , hard drive , etc. I will need ? What else would I need to do to set it up ? I am not much of a gamer and know little about it . TIA


Phil

As far as I know (and don't quote me on it) it really doesn't take much at all to host a game server. You can host a half-life server on nothin' really. I would say as long as you have a pretty good amount of RAM (192-256) and a decent speed CPU (500-ish?) then you'd do fine. Don't even think video cards matter, since when you're running a server all you ar processing is text.

As long as you have a fat pipe going out (good upload speed) then you should be good to go I would think.

Except for UT2003 and BF1942 you could host a dedicated server for most games on any old Pentium 1 system or better. Doesn't really take much horsepower, although I'd recommend at least 128 Mb for Win9x (more for Win2K or XP). Don't need a horsepower drive either, but it shouldn't be some ancient one. Server still needs to load all the big map files. Any ATA 33 or better drive would do the job.

Slap Win98 or NT in an any old box and it'll do the job just fine.

it all comes down to ... how many people are going to be playing? ..

i would say atleast a 500mhz cpu for serving the newergames such as medal of honor, ut2k3, etc.

and stuff that machine with as much ram as you can. ram is a key component to a good server.

vid cards ... you can get away with soem old ass 1meg trident if you want lol .. those dont matter.

you wont need sound ... if its a game that loads stuff fromt he cd .. you will want to get a some what fast cdrom/dvd/ whatever drive. or you can find no cd hacks and stuff .. that would work much better.

for the OS .. i would suggest some form of windows nt or linux ... not sure if there is a server version of medal of honor for linux or not though. you would have to check on that one.

Bandwidth is more important than most system specs. You can be running a dual 2.8G Xeon setup with 4 gigs of ram and it won't mean jack taco if users can't connect reliably.

Thanks for the advice . I have a PIII 800 , 512 MB ram to run in the server . I have Win 2000 I can run on it . Should I format it in FAT 32 or NTFS ?

Like I said , I am not a gamer so I am not really sure how the server is set up . How do I set it up ? Thanks guys

I personally would do Fat32 but thats just me. I don't see a real big reason to do NTFS. Besides, I recently noticed that you can't pop in a Win9x bootdisk on a NTFS system and expect it to boot I like the idea that I can <i>easily</i> format my C:\ parition whenever I want (although less of a problem since I've discovered ghost) So I dunno....I don't think it really matters which way you go, now that I think about it.

I would only use NTFS if you want the security. But since its just a game server and it wont be acting as a file server, fat32 would work well.

FAT32 = Easier to fix, easier to troubleshoot.

Just be aware that Win2K and XP have an artificial partition size limit of 32Mb when creating FAT32 partitions. If you want a partition larger than that you have to create it using FDISK or Partition Magic.