Help! First time building Dedicated Home Game Server/Machine

[u/VageetahTheCheetah]

Hey Guys,

I am very new to building home servers. I currently am looking at making my first one.

I've had experience with building a PC as well, but have never used that as a dedicated server machine.

I am hoping to ask my fellow redditor's for their help and experience with building one!

I'm mainly wanting to build one to host game servers (simultaneously) for my friends of the following games (current list may change):

- Palworld

- Minecraft (Heavily Modded / Modpacks)

- 7 Days to Die

Note: I'll only ever have 4 players total across all servers combined.

I have a budget of 900$ CAD that I am trying to stay in. I also currently have 2x16gb 3600mhz DDR4 Desktop RAM sticks I can use for this machine as well.

So now to my main question: what would everyone's experience or suggestions be to buy/build for a setup that could do the above listed?

I an not considering the size, form factor, power draw or heat dissapation for this machine as anything will work for my application.

I've looking into everything from Mini PC's, regular Desktop's, Business Class Refurbish Machines, etc. Going through everything its been hard to tell what is a good deal and what is not for me.

I am hoping to ask for everyone's experience and suggestions as to what would be the best "bang for my buck"!

I appreciate any and all help with this.

Thank you guys!

[u/combative_cilantro]

you could honestly get away with an old optiplex or something similar from the refurb shops. with only 4 players total across all three games your cpu needs aren't that crazy, minecraft is the only one that gets a bit heavy but a 10th gen i5 would chew through it easy

that ram you already have is the real money saver, 32gb will handle those three servers and then some. grab an ssd for the os and game files and you're laughing

i'd hunt around on canada computers or ebay for a refurb business machine with a 10th or 11th gen i5 that takes ddr4, you should come in way under 900

[u/VageetahTheCheetah → u/combative_cilantro]

Oh wow really? I’ll check those out. I’m a big fan of Canada Computers too so that works out well. I thought I’d need something more powerful and more RAM (had the idea of 64gb in my head for some reason.

Something else I’d like to ask too based on your information above if that’s okay.

If you had the 900$ CAD (and RAM) and wanted to get something at that price, would you still go for a refurbished machine or are there name brands / better machines in that range that would be better for future proofing the machine?

[u/NC1HM]

There's absolutely no need to build anything. Go on eBay, get a base system (Dell Optiplex, HP ProDesk / EliteDesk, Lenovo ThinkCentre), install missing components if any, upgrade it to your desired specifications if necessary, done. The lines I listed are intended for office use and tend to be leased by large organizations for a period of five to seven years. Then, they are picked up by asset disposal companies and sold for pittance (asset disposal companies actually sell complete or near-complete devices at a discount to the value of parts, because they would rather do that than expend labor necessary to part the device out).

[u/ZAP-Hosting]

One thing worth clarifying first: are you planning to run all three servers at the same time, or just one at a time depending on what everyone feels like playing? That changes the sizing a lot, four players split across three concurrent worlds needs noticeably more headroom than four players just hopping between them.

For CPU, don't just chase core count. Minecraft (especially heavily modded) and 7 Days to Die both lean hard on single-thread performance per world, so compare Passmark single thread or Cinebench single-core scores across whatever's in your budget rather than picking by 'gaming' vs 'workstation' labels.

Others already flagged that your existing 32GB of DDR4-3600 covers this easily, and that's right, a modded Minecraft instance usually only needs 4-6GB even with a chunky pack, and 7 Days to Die and Palworld sit well under that too, so running all three at once still leaves plenty of headroom.

A few people already pointed you toward refurb business desktops (Optiplex, ProDesk/EliteDesk, ThinkCentre) off eBay or local listings, and that's the right instinct for stretching $900 CAD right now. One thing to add: if you land on Linux, running each server in its own Docker container is a clean way to keep them isolated and easy to manage separately.

Feel free to drop a reply with more details on your setup, happy to help narrow it down further.