I recently found I was having a problem with my current home server, in that the Minecraft Server application was struggling massively because I build a lot of large redstone machines. Minecraft Server runs the the main world engine thingy in a single thread, which means that it needed a big increase in single thread performance. Not something the 45w AMD Athlon X4 615E in my file server can provide, So I decided to build a separate box just for Minecraft Server.
I raided my spare parts cupboard, and found I had a 128gb Crucial M4 SSD, 4gb of Corsair XMS3 DDR3, some Bitfenix Spectre Pro fans, and a load of watercooling parts. After some deliberation, I decided that - given that single thread performance was key - an Intel Pentium G3258 CPU in a watercooled, overclocked system would be pretty cool, use up all my spares and it wouldn’t be too expensive to buy the other parts I needed. I’ve never built an ITX based system before, so decided this would be a good project to build on that platform seeing as there would be no GPU and only one SSD.
Here’s the spec I landed on:
- CASE: Silverstone Milo ML05B
- MOBO: Asus H81I-Plus
- CPU: Intel Pentium G3258 Anniversary Edition - 4.2ghz @ 1.2v
- RAM: Corsair XMS3 2x2gb 1600mhz DDR3
- SSD: Crucial M4 120gb
- PSU: BeQuiet SFX Power 2 300W
- CPU BLOCK: Phobya UC-2 LT
- RAD: XSPC AX240
- FITTINGS: Barrow 16/10
- PUMPRES: Magicool DCP450
Build was very simple, just chopped a couple of holes in the case for hoses and plugged it all together.
