Octa AMD FX vs Octa Atom C2750 for NAS/file server and game server use

Hardware Hub CPU
1

*retyping because I lost it all.*

 Hello,

I am planning on building a File server for an online community as they have no solution made specifically for them, I want to make use of FreeNAS or some linux flavor as the OS and it will have MAX 15 4th HDDs, and a boot/cache ssd

 

Assuming that ZFS doesn't take all the power, I also want to host minecraft...or whatever the fudge game...server(s) to make a small amount of money to do maintenance on the server...such as harddisks that explode and leave a mess...

 

The file server is free to that comunity, the minecraft/gaming thing...not so much...

 

The reason why this is so hard is because the Atom seems to be faster than AMD's Phenom II line and even makes it up to the E3 Xeons.

 

I can get a SuperMicro Atom board for about $300 and monitor it through it's lan ports, give it 16-32GB of ram and could be set there

But I also have a Gigabyte 970 chipset board (I read it was one of those "legendary" ones...meh) and getting an AMD 8 core would be cheaper...at the expense of higher heat and power output...

 

What would be considered best, and please explain why?

 

Intel Atom: Should I looking into passive or active cpu cooling (I am looking at the supermicro with the 4x and 8x pcie slots)

AMD FX: Which of these would be best bet? I would cool it with a Noctual NH-U12S, NH-C12P, or the 14mm variations if they fit the board...so even the highest clocked FX shouldn't be a problem...I hope...

thank you! They would be placed in a mid tower if that matters!

 

2

That is two totally different CPUs, but for you needs the atom should be a good bet, might want to consider a cheap not so noisy cooler.

It should be more than capable to run a MC server and fileserver and earn you the money back in the long period(depending on how heavy the use will be)

3

I know they are totally different...I just happened to have a motherboard for the amd...

The supermicro comes with a fan on the heatsink, I don't see a need for a new fan.

 

Actually multiple MC servers...they're only 1 thread so I could run 7...leaving 1 for the file server...

I would be running other peoples server pretty much.

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So you think the atom would be plenty?

Okay, if I were to use an amd, would there be a speed benifit? Or just wasted power(and electricity)?

 

4

The atoms should be plenty.

If you will get any performance increase going with the FX...


Well, the performance should be similar, the atom might win due to better cache-management a better branch predictor and such.

5

okay, thank you!

 

I'll just see if there is something else I can do with the amd board...sell it c:

 

I also like the low power usage...wouldn't make much sense to try to make money off $5 hosting and power hungry parts...

6

I think you should hold on. The atom is good for a file server. Its nice and low powered. However... Minecraft and game server applications in general tend not to leverage the use of multiple cores. Minecraft doesn't and relies on incredibly fast single core performance.

Having a quick look at Passmark, you can see the FX chip has almost 3x the single threaded performance. Any game servers on the Atom will likely be horribly laggy, which is not good if your planning to make money off of it.

7

isn't passmark horribly biased?

8

and how much power does one REALLY need for 10-15 people, MC offloads minor stuff to other cores...so it looks to be fine.

9

towards intel. that should say something.

10

considering the cost diff, go with an FX cpu, but I don't know if you really need the 8350 or 8320, depending on how many server you're gonna host. the power cost is maybe $50 a year, at most, it's not gonna pay off to use the atom.

I suggest WD red drive, they are meant for NAS use, and are actually pretty inexpensive for the capacity.

as far as a cooler, a hyper 212 is fine, if you're not gonna OC much.

 

11

stay tuned, we did a review of the asrock 8-core avoton board and it rocks my socks off.

 

12

Sweet, looking forward to it.

13

MC is barely multi-core. Due to it's horrendous coding, it really only can be run on a single core. Yes bukkit can allow plugins to offload to separate cores. Any multi-threading that is usually seen in vanilla minecraft is usually the host OS doing so, in which case you shall notice the total percentage of CPU utilization is only that of a single core.

The power requirement for 10-15 to say 30 doesn't scale linearly either. As once base code is running, like the I/O manager. Only basic stuff has to be run on top for each player. Some of which maybe within the same chunk in which doesn't require additional operations for mob/npc movements to say if the players were in separate locations.

As Comissar also says, Passmark is slightly biased towards Intel CPUs and even it says its terrible in shear performance against an FX chip.

14

You should pretend to put a gpu in for game benchmarks, then never do them...lol

 

From what little I found, It'll rock more than socks!

15

"Due to it's horrendous coding"


You do realize that somethings might actually benefit only using 1 core, it is just 1 big java runtime, which can be slightly stressful on the decoders, whereof intels complex decoder.

How exactly are passmark in favour for Intel? Please enlighten me.

16

Yes many things do benefit from only being on run on one core and in some respects Java is suited to it due to its compile once run on many systems design. (Java bytecode and then instructed using the JVM for each platform) making it a great platform for mobile devices.

My statement of "horrendous coding" is in reference to the actual code Markus Pearson wrote. Not the Java code it is written.