[Tyrian]

I have a friend of mine who has asked me to look at a game server for him.  He wants it to run Rainbow 6 3:  Raven Shield, with 16 player slots.  He found a company online that rents servers on a monthly fee, at http://www.gameservernetwork.com/.  For a 16 slot R6: RS server, it's $48/month.  Does anyone know anything about/have experience with that particular company?

As a second option, he's also looked at buying a server.  I can build desktops, but I've never done a server before.  I've poked around NewEgg a little bit, and this is what I put together.  It's very preliminary and not complete, but it's a place to start.

Barebones Server
Opteron 100 Socket 939
Sapphire X1950

I'll also need to upgrade the PSU if he decides to get the X1950.  It needs a 500W PSU and the server only comes with a 450W one.  As to RAM, it needs to be unbuffered.  The mainboard in the server apparently doesn't support registered RAM.  For the HDD, I'm not sure what to get.  I know it needs to be a SATA. 

Thanks for any help!

[CP5670]

As far as the DIY option goes, the barebones setup looks decent enough, but the 185 is quite overpriced for what it is. Get a 170 or at the most a 180 instead. That video card is not a great choice either. You're better off getting an 8800GTS 640MB or 2900XT, which cost less and are comparably fast without the Crossfire compatibility issues. Although if this system is going to be a server only, it shouldn't need anything beyond integrated video anyway.

As for the hard drive, this is a pretty good one. The 250-320GB range seems to be the overall sweet spot these days.

[SadisticSid]

If you build your own then co-location in a data centre will not be cheap, and you'd need to install and maintain it yourself, so it's unfeasible to do unless your friend's rich and has too much free time on his hands. Hosted server providers consolidate the cost by running several game servers per machine and buying rack space in bulk, but I've known performance to be extremely variable depending on network and CPU overheads on that machine. I think you might be better off getting a dedicated (managed) server and just running your games servers on top of that. Then you can run as many games as you want and use it for web hosting, FTP, and anything else.

[Tyrian]

How much would a dedicated managed server cost?

[achtung]

How much would a dedicated managed server cost?

Too much.

[phatosealpha]

Why are you buying a graphics card for the server?  Is he intending to actually play the game while on the server?  I would expect most games to have a stand alone server app, which doesn't do rendering and doesn't really need an expensive graphics card to accelerate anything.

[Davros]

why the x1950 ???
a server runs the game without displaying any video

[Tyrian]

why the x1950 ???
a server runs the game without displaying any video

Hmm...Didn't know that.  I'm more used to building desktops, so that's the experience I'm going on.

[Ulala]

Yeah, unless you plan on playing games on this thing (thus defeating the purpose of a "server" machine), you really don't need a vidcard, let alone one that costs $400.

[Tyrian]

The server is supposed to host Rainbow 6 multiplayer games.