g4m3rof1337

iam looking into building my own cheap server made for lan parties and gaming id like to use it at lans.... so...could i use it as a regular computer to so it doesnt collect dust when not in use?


any sites or parts i can see?

thanks

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diduknowthat

Why not just serve with your own computer? That's what I do, and it works perfectly fine.

But if you want to build one, look at newegg, they'll have al the parts you need to build a cheap server.

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g4m3rof1337

how would that work?

could i upgrade my mobo and other stuff?

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tomb08uk

er...dont need to, if going to be hosting games the just select the system as the host, or if want a full active server functionality then install a server OS

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tlarkin

I think what you are referring to is a dedicated server. It makes for better game play over a LAN. You don't need a killer system to use as a dedicated server at a LAN party, because it won't actually run the game, it just hosts it. All you will see on the server is a command line interface. Mostly this is done by editing the executable to add the console in.

If you google it I am sure there is step by step to do this. Back in the day I used to run my own dedicated CS server on my secondary system, and it worked fine.

g4m3rof1337

i mgiht just upgrade my current comp
could i run 2 OS's ? pro and server?

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tomb08uk

Yes you dont need a high end system as of such, as long as its able to handle the hosting of the actually connectivity then it will be adeqaute, nearly any system would be pretty much able to handle it.

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tlarkin

You don't need to run server OS to run as a game server. I just ran windows 2k pro desktop and suse linux (for games like HL which offer a dedicated linux server you can download). A server OS is made for managing tons of workstations on a network, enforcing group/user policy, etc. Its not designed to host video games, the game itself will act as a server

It just hosts the game, so it will compile data sent in and send it back out to each player. Rendering and all that stuff is done by the machine playing the game, so its only a small amount of data that is transmitted from host to client.

diduknowthat

IMO, dont bother using dual boot with server OS and normal OS and upgrade and all the stuff. With my computer, I can host an online 16 player Halo demo game with no lag.

What im trying to say is...you dont need a server computer to server a lan game. Especially if it's a small lan.

__________________

Dell Latitude XT Convertible Tablet
Intel Core 2 Duo U7600 1.2ghz CPU
3GB DDR2 677 Memory
120GB 1.8" PATA Hard Drive
ATI Radeon Xpress 1250 Graphics
12.1" WXGA LED Touch Screen
N-Trig Capacitive Touch/Active Digitizer

tlarkin

No matter how bad ass your system is, a dedciated host is always the best performance. Sometimes the person hosting the game gets a slight advantage since their system will respond slightly faster. ALso, if you nic sucks or has shoddy drivers and doesn't really run in full duplex mode then it makes it even harder for others on the network to get the same performance as you. Overtime when you start getting a bit of a memroy leak or otherwise performance goes down faster on a host machine, where as a dedicated host machine doesn't really have that effect as much. It doesn't take a killer machine like I said earlier. Just use one of your (or someone elses) secondary machine as the host. It just needs a basic OS, possibly some ram, video card has no effect because there is no rendering at all done on the dedicated host machine.

The downside is, if you dedicate a machine you cannot play the game on it.

Like I said earlier you edith the path in the exe to run the HLDS (dedicated server) for HL, and much other games do the same

source: http://server.counter-strike.net/ser...o&show=windows

Then you can go into the server.cfg file (text file) and start editing things, and tweak the server how you want to run it.