It’s finally time to consider new Hardware for our future servers. It’s been harder and harder to run our servers using so many weaker hardware and the power consumption is through the roof as well.
Right now our Server potential is 8 x 2600K’s if they were fully up and running and operational. If they were hitting there max TDP (Thermal design power) they would be 760 Watts (95 Watts Each) In Theory for their maximum power consumption. We normally don’t look at TDP and calculate our Hydro costs but rather use it to help compare the usage to other cpu’s on the market.
More Modern CPU’s are also using between 60-95 TDP, but their modern and providing more cores and more single thread performance. Now keep in mind this does not also include other things like PSU overhead / loss, Ram, Hard Drives, etc eating even more power up.
If we Use PassMark to Bench our CPU’s we have a CPU Mark Score of 8434 and a Single Thread Score of 1,941 and that is still considered decent in 2019 for most servers. That being said there is a lot of games becoming very creative that ends up pushing the bounds of that single core performance that makes it more difficult.
Now if we take that main score and x 8 we get 67,472 score and now you have a decent small cluster of CPU Power but not amazing for 8 Servers that are now eating 760+ Watts of power.
Now let’s compare it to a more Modern CPU and we are going to actually compare it to AMD as AMD in 2019 has really come in fierce by providing some the best CPU’s for the best value and keeping their TDP down quite a bit.
The AMD Ryzen 7 3700X is one of Ryzen new Flagship CPU’s that runs a TDP of 65W but not only that it runs a single thread performance of 2,908 and a overall score of 23,862 with it’s 8 cores. That is quite impressive for both those very heavy server applications on a Single Thread and those other applications that let you run on multiple threads. The best part you can put multiple game servers on this and still have room to breath.
So if you were to buy 3 AMD Ryzen 7 3700X you would end up at a score of 71,586 vs the 67,472 and your max TDP would also become 195 Watts compared to a whopping 760 Watts and this day of age where power is insanely expensive that is a very very good thing.
Not only would our Power Usage and costs go down but we can actually add proper updates that would increase our speeds overall in so many areas like Ram & Hard Drives. Right now were using basic SSD’s but we can finally move to NVMe where we can get 6-10 times the Read / Write Speeds compared to our past SSD’s and our Memory from DDR3 to DDR4 and not only that prices would go down as DDR3 is quite expensive where DDR4 is quite cheap now on the market and continuing to drop.
With this setup as well we be able to fit in 4x16GB of Ram so each box could be running 64 Gigs of Ram and that is quite awesome for our ram needs and usage. Compared to our current Mix of 8-24 Gigs we have now due to costs and lack of decent supply of DDR3 on the market.
So calculating the Cost for fun I put in a 1TB NVMe, 64 Gigs ram, 550W PSU, 4U Rackmount Server Case with 8 Internal Bays, The 3700 with a Decent Cooler, MSI Gaming Motherboard we come to a total of $1324.26 Canadian or $995.57 USD and that is with Tax. Not bad for a Modern Day Beast of a Server. Clearly this me throwing all quickly on Amazon to get an idea what we are dealing with.
This investment will not be something I make right away. It will be something I start doing sometime Next Year it could be in the Spring or even the Summer time, but it’s something I’m highly considering doing and honestly I doubt I will not do it as long as I can keep growing with my other projects.
I thought it be fun to document this and be a little more open about the costs of building a server and even the Power consumption of a server. Keep in mind I was sharing max value’s and the servers don’t just sit there eating away a 100 Watts an hour idle.
