sorry guys, I had gotten the specs wrong on the machine I was looking at building. The CPU served me very well for gaming, and I would be very shocked if the cpu couldn't host a 24 person server. It met my needs. I had it for about 3 years before I upgraded to a Phenom II x4, which has turned out to be a great cpu also. I talked to the guys at work, and they are going to let me use one of their blade servers with one of their old SCSI harddrives. Turns out I probably wont be building a rig to run the server anyhow, unless I really need to, I do not know what Xeons are running in the server, and I will not be able to find out till I get the information to the computer. Sad part: I am going to be running linux. I'm not really sad, but I will have to deploy a working one at home before I do it remotely via commandline/ftp just to understand how it all works.
bandwidth will not be an issue with such connection. but an athlon xp will very sure be too slow. dual or quad core does not really help you, as most calculations are done within one thread. a blade server is probably overkill in many aspects, and even a not further specified "Xeon 3.0" can very well be too slow (as there are 3 GHz Xeons on the market since ages, you will need to know which generation it is!).
what you really need: a decent and recent cpu with a good single core speed. multiple cores do help you if you want to host more then 1 server, but it helps very little for 1 single server. you already have a good connection. the rest is basically unimportant (the requirements are so low, that it will be hard to fail meeting them)
Thanks for your information, and I did not know about the Xeon thing until I looked into it last night, and I see what your saying. Thanks very much for the information though, and I will probably update this thread when I decide a path. it's just basically colocation, the term for it. So I will be deciding specs here shortly. I can get a motherboard for free now, for the AMD proccessor, and I might just try it out just not with 32 slots, more like 24 or 20, I'm not trying to start a business or anything I'd just like to have my own GG DM server
8 slots, you are over-reacting, I think 1ghz can run 8 slot server but for 32slot DM server (gungame doesn't matter) you need some piped up CPU with frequency around 2.8-3.4 and it better be latest generation intel. Don't go for xeon, they are pricy and people use them for servers because of business level requirements: long guarantee, low power consumption, supports multi-processor motherboards, as long as you don't need any of those go for i7 and sandybridge which will save you lots of money
M server.
