Need DediBox Advice

So the Arma 3 gaming community I am a member of want to buy a dedicated Server box and rent Rack space in or near Chicago that is using INTERNAP so they don't have to change IP addresses.

The server needs to be Dual Socket with CPUs that have at least 3.2GHz and Quad or better cores. ~32GB of RAM, SSDs, Windows Server 2012 R2 Stand. Teh price they are looking at is somewhere around $5k. Not sure how. Any suggestions would be nice.

For the Rack space, I need recommendations of rack renting spaces that use INTERNAP and have good Uplink and Downlink speeds. In the Chicago area too.

Those specs seem very excessive for a private game server.

Arma 3 can and will use those resources. The server will run at least 3 server instances of Arma 3. It will also run a Teamspeak server. As well as possibly a minecraft server.

Interesting stuff, I've given a quick look into what Arma 3 likes to use in terms of resources on the server side (as I have never run it) and its very vague. However suggests, as you say, that it uses ALL THE RESOUCES!!!!!

There are several things that stand out to me about this which may cause issue (mainly with the cost).

You say the system needs to be dual socketed (which for Intel implies the Xeon or AMD Opterons) but once you get above around 2.6-2.8GHz on Xeon chips, the price starts to sky rocket (especially with a number of cores).

Going with something new from an OEM maybe an option.... for example Dell. However they are pretty much done switching from their 12th to 13th gen, meaning that there isn't much offering from the older 2011 socket. With the newest stuff (2011v3) your budget will restrict you from getting a fast dual socketed system.

So let's look at older stuff, you may have to fill in blanks here as I really do not know the in's and out's of Arma engine.

You could find some older 2011 socket systems, but may prove still pricey. With my research (albeit brief) pointed towards Arma favoring higher clocks rather than multiple cores (but with it still able to leverage the core count (like Minecraft)).

You could take a look into the older LGA 1366 socket. There are a lot of parts and server surplus available for this socket as it is still highly capable just is limited on core count (6 cores per CPU max). This socket does have parts like the X5690 clocked at a rather impressive 3.46GHz with 6 cores! (however the single threaded performance is on par with the AMD piledriver parts)

With the number of instances of Arma you which to run being a pioneering persuasion to use a dual socketed system. Have you considered a single socketed system? You could potentially leverage the use of a single higher clocked Xeon, but also the X99 platform with say the i7 5960x. (high clock and high amount of memory capability). Taking the i7 route maybe more a custom built solution rather than from OEM, but is definitely worth a look at.

Have you tried running a server already? If so what was the machine specs and how well did it handle the task?

You can pick up older but still decent servers from http://savemyserver.com

we currently have a 8 threaded VPS........Dont do it. It runs the Wasteland server just fine but as soon as the Wasteland server restarts, the ALiVE server sucks up all the freed up resources and makes the Wasteland server suck hard. In fact, talk is that they are going to move the ALiVE server (my project) to a separate box. My server will easily eat 2GB of RAM.

We actually designate cores to processes. For example, the Wasteland server gets cores 1-4 and the headless clients (used to distribute the AI load and such) are given cores 5 and 6. The ALiVE server is given cores 0 and 7. then, they have the Teamspeak server and MySQL DB running on the same box. I have offered to let them use my DO droplet for the MySQL DB. Of course I would install a MariaDB for the performance improvement.

Ah VPS.... fun stuff. VPS vary greatly in terms of their performance as they are affected easily by other Containers on the machine. (As the provider easily over subscribe the machines)

As you say VPS, I presume it is Linux based. You can give this command:

cat /proc/cpuinfo

A quick run and it will tell you the processors that the host is using.

Which will give you a rough idea of the current hardawre being utilised.

By the sounds of things (where by when one of the servers restarts) that the system is utilizing the SWAP partition heavily and upon noticing the RAM availability shifts data back out of SWAP. You could try limiting the processes RAM utilization (except this may cause huge issues when it does inevitably run out)

The i7 5960x approach may work well then. As you will double the number of threads (to 16) and be guaranteed the fasted currently avaliable platform without killing the budget. Plus when the next round of enthusiast chips come out for X99 (with rumors of a 10 core part) there will be a nice upgrade path.

I will take a look at some other options later when I have a little more time.

unfortunately the owners had an issue with the VPS provider giving them an unsecured Linux box and they got owned. So, they only deal with Windows.