[2022] hardware for own server questions

1. Not for 8-12 players. Especially on Windows. Setting affinity to only use the physical cores, or running headless Linux will improve things, but that is a pretty dated CPU with abysmal multi-threading support. 4-6 should be ok.

2. Not as bad as the client, but it will have some impact.

3. Your CPU won't keep up with a NVMe. If your motherboard is from the same era, it likely only supports m.2 SSD which won't be notably faster than a sata SSD. If you had a newer motherboard that does actually support NVMe, you're still limited by the CPU architecture so the results won't be huge. Would be better off to just match the SSD with another one and put them in RAID-0. Same performance for less cost.

Originally posted by tigerseye: 1. I do have i5-7500 but thats looks to be about the same power? Another option is I could get an i7-3960x with 16gb ddr3-2133 if that would be a good choice?

Though they are both from the same era, and the i5 has fewer cores, the overall performance will be better. This is because at best you can only really use four of the six physical cores with the 1600, but the i5 will more effectively use all four physical cores plus the hyperthreaded cores. Essentially doubling your available data bandwidth.

Originally posted by tigerseye: 2. When i upgraded my own desktop from 16gb ddr4-2133 that was 3000 oc'ed to 32gb ddr4-3333 it made a huge difference on horde nights and big city loading.
Yes it would. You have more overhead, and better bandwidth. The specs of your GPU can play a huge part in this performance factor as well. On the server, you aren't going to see a huge change between 3000 and 3333.

Originally posted by tigerseye: 3. Im using 2 samsung sata ssds in raid 0 right now and it benchmarks 90% the speed of m.2 samsung, so im probably just going to do that.

Yeah, that is what I would recommend. The Samsung drives handle the load well too. That is what we have in our current server, though it's four of them in RAID-0.