Need advice for gaming server loadout

[0xygenthief]

Ok, so here in Afghanistan it gets booring! I have convinced my colleages and several other nearby offices that what we need is a good old fasioned lan party to deal with the monotony. At this point the lan cables have been ran, switches/routers are in place but many of the guys are skiddish about using government hardware to host a game even if it isn't on a government network. Everyone here has their own laptop but even my gaming laptop isn't quite balzy enough to cut it IMO.

So I am going to build out a new server for the group here. The big question is what would be the optimal setup. My thoughts are lending themselves toward the aging socket 1366 with a 970 i7 and 24 gb of ram. Though expense wise a 1156 with a 2600 and 16 gb is definately cheaper. The question is whether or not the extra 2 cores/4 with hyper threading and 8 gb of ram would make a big difference?

It is likely that we will have a whole lot of people wanting to hop on the lan to play a game or two. So there is the potential to have two games running simultaneously (VMware). At this time we haven't decided which games to run so there is an unknown variable there.

By the way, we are open for suggestions regarding the games we may host. The hope is for a FPS style setup CS or COD4 type games. Essentially games that don't require the latest and greatest graphics to run well since everyone here will be using laptops to play.

Ideas?

[ND40oz]

You could run CS 1.6 off your lappy and everyone would be able to run that, doesn't matter what computer they have pretty much. If you want to run newer games, I'd try it first and see if your laptop can handle it before investing in dedicated hardware. You'll really need to know what games you want to support, the number of players you intend to have at one time and then you can figure out the hardware requirements from there.

[0xygenthief]

OK, so how about some LAN gaming options. I'd prefer FREE games as I'd like to make it as cheap as possible for the soldiers here. The restrictions on the games are that 1) Needs to be graphically weak, something a modern laptop could handle 2) Needs to be something that doesn't require stateside authentication, our bandwidth is very limited 3) Needs to be a dedicated server so we can manage it and again reduce the bandwidth utilized.

The whole stateside authentication issue may be more than just bandwidth dependent as some ports may eventually be blocked (the connectivity is still government) so anything Steam related has the potential to get blocked making authentication a big problem.

I have been looking at FEAR Combat, CS 1.6, and maybe COD4 1.6 (hacked). I'd prefer to use a non hacked version of COD4 but again its the authentication issue.

[ballz0r]

good old half life death match

that game was insane fun

Crack open a few beers and go to town with a crowbar

[RampageWSU]

CS 1.6 oughta be popular.

[JasonDTM]

Quake 3 arena!

[0xygenthief]

Awesome suggestions, thanks guys.