ARK: Survival Evolved Forum

I have googled for hours and looked through about 15 pages of threads (through various forums) and have not found enough info to answer these questions. I try to research first because I hate re asking a question so sorry if this is the 30th time this has been asked. There really needs to be a damn sticky.

I wanted to know what would be the better route for server hardware.

1650v3 OC to ~4.5 GHz or an OC Skylake build?
-If I went skylake I would probably buy a Skylake chip from someone that had exceptional OCing like 4.7+ GHz I wouldn't mind the premium and finding that wouldn't be that hard. Finding a 1650v3 that has oddly high quality would be exceptionally hard and too expensive.

I know this is largely single thread limited but does ECC for these servers matter?

Does the server need the extra cores?

Would the server be more stable with ECC? Stablility is a major factor for me.

I am wondering if ECC and 6 cores is more important for the server compared to getting 5-15% better single thread performance.

I have yet to find any documentation or graphing of high pop server loads so I have no idea what the requirements are for the CPU.

Other info:
I would be using NVMe and 32 or 64GB of RAM in either build. I heard 32GB is more then enough but I am fine with getting more if needed. I'll be using 16GB sticks to allow room for growth. If I went with ECC I would be using 2133 but if ECC is pointless I'll specifically run the numbers to calculate what Mhz and CAS latency gets the lowest true latency for DDR4.

Additionally:
What are the pros and cons of windows vs linux?

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Also I have yet to see much info on the BW requirements

I have yet to find any documentation or graphing of high pop server loads so I have no idea what the requirements are for BW and packets.

What is needed for a full 100 person server?

What quanity of people can be hosted on 20+ Mbps upload


I have noticed and seen the issues of high queued crafted items with the stalling. What can be done to combat this? Better router to handle the large requests? Any recommendations?


FYI I also have this posted in Steam forums. Figured this would be a better place since the forums is spammed with ads
http://steamcommunity.com/app/346110/di ... 063090193/

from what i have heard ECC is not of much benefit for game servers and stability so I will be going 6700K and buy one from http://siliconlottery.com/products/6700k48g that was binned for 4.8GHz. That'll give me 10-20% more performance then a haswell 1650v3 in single thread since single thread is more important then ECC and larger cache.

I also found pyschz hosting which seems to be affordable for a Dallas server. I also found DDR4 memory that has sub 10ns latency so its on par with most DDR except some extremely hard to find ones that do ~7ns.

from playing in a server I have seen my client pull 5-70 KBps per second with random bursts around 170KBps so I still have no idea on what BW requirements will be. I'll post detailed logs mid January or whenever I get a server running so the community has something to review since no other server admin is competent and can post logs -_- I'll also post tick info on various logs since no other admin can bother to post detailed server performance info. :/

Yep, game is heavily reliant on single core CPU power. Nothing else matters. Not disk/io, not network i/o, not DDR3 vs DDR4, not memory speed. NOTHING except CPU single core frequency matters.

Best bet right now is water-cooled 4970k or like you said, a lottery chip overclockable beyond a stock 4790k.

OVH has the 4790k for a decent price ($79) and Webtropia ($69 ish as well). Both are not over-clockable.

Psychz - are they cool with overclocking?

Admin this is an alpha game, do not be so harsh..

On other news im hosting my 100 slot server in a dual xeon with 4gb of ram, loading time is 5minutes exactly all day all night. And 80GB HDD.

It runs very smooth.

My only problem is the lag generated by the save game server action. every 30 minutes we feel a spike of like 3-4 seconds.

Im interested in hear from people hosting their own servers, system specs including OS, amount of players they have with detailed server performance info ..
Im interested in hosting one for about 30 players on my 100mbit connection, just not sure on the specs I would need for a good smooth game play, dont really want to go to the expense of dual CPU's like panacuba posted .. Also not wanting to OC the CPU either..
I saw that, according to PassMark site the 4790k @ 4Ghz is the fastest single thread CPU .. https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html

dual CPU is useless because the game is single threaded for the most part. All you need is a 4 or 6 core CPU. 1650v3, 4970k, or 6700K. Those are the three best CPUs for the job. 6700k should be faster then a 4970k depending on the clocks. You absolutely want to overclock! Until the game is multithreaded properly you have to OC for any kind of good performance.

passmark is a piece of shit benchmark. A 4.7-4.8 GHz 6700K is faster then a 5 GHz 4970k by varying degrees depending on the type of test. Look at anandtech and other places reviews on IPC (instruction per clock).

The main issues with the game is latency and single thread performance. Is the 100Mb fiber or copper? The better the network you have the better the response times will be.

There was something else but I forgot.

BTW if you are funny the server in AU no one from the US or EU will be able to play because of pings and vice versa for US/EU to AU. Your AU server will be a god send or other AU players and remote islands near China and japan. AU is notorious for shitty pings every where in the world...its just how the worlds internet is laid out. Ark is very ping sensitive compared to other games from what i have heard (its because the server is authorize and runs all the calcs). NS2, CS, and other games are even friendlier for pings.

This is a pure guess but I would wager that anything over 150-170 ping is unplayable for ark but someone current me if I am wrong. That is what I have read and seen. Ping places in the world to see what is sub 150ms and that will be your player base.